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About Prairie Record

Prairie Record shows how the people who represent you actually voted, taken from the official record and linked back to it so you can check.

What it covers

2,984 floor roll calls and 6,287 committee votes across 4,439 bills, holding 325,966 individual positions for 196 people currently in office.

Illinois only, and the legislative branch only: the General Assembly and Illinois’ delegation to Congress. Other states and other branches are not covered — not partially, not approximately.

The Illinois record begins with the 104th General Assembly, sworn in January 2025, and the federal record with the current Congress. Service before that is real and is not shown here, which matters when comparing two legislators: the one elected earlier has a longer career than this site can see.

Where the data comes from

  • The Illinois General Assembly publishes every roll call as a PDF. Those are the authority for Illinois votes: each vote page links the exact PDF it came from, and a local check re-reads them and compares every stored position, tally and committee label against the original.
  • Open States supplies Illinois bills, actions, sponsors and vote rosters. Where it disagrees with an ILGA PDF, the PDF wins.
  • Congress.gov supplies U.S. House roll calls, and senate.govthe Senate’s, which Congress.gov does not publish at all.
  • The U.S. Census Bureau resolves an address to its districts when you look one up. Nothing about that lookup is stored — see privacy.

Data refreshes weekly, on Sundays. Illinois legislation moves in bursts and the General Assembly’s spring session ends in May, so a quiet stretch of months is the normal condition rather than a sign of something broken.

What it deliberately leaves out

  • Federal roll calls record Illinois’ delegation only. A U.S. House vote stores the full chamber tally alongside the 17 Illinois positions, not all 435. The pages say so where it matters.
  • Bills that die without a vote leave no trace here. Most bills die in committee by never being called, which produces no roll call — so what a committee declined to take up cannot be shown.
  • Gubernatorial appointments and federal nominations are excluded. Illinois numbers appointments like bills and they carry real roll calls, but they are not legislation.
  • A handful of votes stay unattributed. Where a source names a voter in a way that could mean two different legislators, the position is left unresolved rather than credited to a guess. Crediting the wrong person is worse than admitting a gap.

How to check it

Every vote page links the official record it was built from. If a number here disagrees with the source, the source is right and this is a bug worth reporting.

There is no ranking, scoring or grading of legislators anywhere on this site, and there will not be. Every scoring rule encodes a politics; the votes do not. Divided votes are surfaced because most roll calls are unanimous and say little, not because disagreement is a virtue.