Methodology

How the bills are chosen, where every fact comes from, and what a match means.

Which votes count

From every roll call of the 119th Congress (2025–26) published by Voteview, this site keeps final votes on bills and joint resolutions: passage, suspension and passage, concurring in the other chamber's changes, conference reports and veto overrides. It drops procedural votes, simple resolutions and nominations, and any vote where the losing side had less than 10% of the votes cast. When a bill had several final votes in one chamber, the last one counts.

How the quiz is chosen

A fixed rule picks 24 bills, so no person or model decides which issues matter:

1. Only bills with a Congressional Research Service summary.
2. Score: 2 points if both chambers voted on it, plus up to 2 points for how close the vote was (a tie scores 2), plus 1 point if the last vote was within 180 days, plus 0.5 if it became law.
3. Highest score first, with at most 3 bills per policy area and at most 5 Congressional Review Act disapproval resolutions.

The quiz is rebuilt when new votes arrive, so it stays current. Shared result links keep working because each answer is stored with its bill's id.

What the quiz shows you

Each bill's name comes from its official title (popular or short title when there is one; for disapproval resolutions, the rule being overturned). The description is the first sentence of the CRS summary, and the full summary is one click away. How Congress voted appears only after you answer, so the tally can't anchor you.

How matching works

• For each current member, agreement = bills where the member's recorded vote equals yours ÷ bills you both voted on. Skipped bills, and votes the member missed, are left out.
• House members are compared on the House's votes and senators on the Senate's. Bills that only one chamber voted on compare only that chamber.
• National lists rank members with at least 5 shared votes. Ties are shown as ties: on party-line votes many members vote identically.
• “On the 2026 ballot” means the member's FEC candidate id (from the congress-legislators project) is a statutory 2026 House or Senate candidate in the FEC's candidate master file.

Limits

• A yea or nay on a final vote compresses a lot: members sometimes vote against bills they support over a single provision, or for bills they dislike as part of a deal.
• Only members' recorded votes in this Congress count, so challengers who hold no seat cannot be matched.
• Roll calls arrive when Voteview publishes them, usually within a few weeks.

Sources

• Roll calls: Voteview (Lewis, Poole, Rosenthal, Boche, Rudkin and Sonnet), with links to the Clerk of the House and the Senate.
• Titles, policy areas and summaries: GovInfo BILLSTATUS bulk data (Library of Congress and CRS; public domain).
• Names, caucus and FEC ids: the public-domain congress-legislators project.
• 2026 candidates: the FEC candidate master file (cn26), without addresses.