Sunlight Labs Services

Deprecation Notice

This API is deprecated in favor of the Real Time Congress API. It contains most legislative information that Drumbone does. Drumbone may be deactivated in the near future.

Introduction

Roll call votes taken by the United States Congress. There are two methods available:

• roll - Returns one roll call document, referenced by roll ID.
• rolls - Returns multiple roll call document, paginated, filtered, and ordered by various parameters.

Important: Use of this data is subject to GovTrack's bulk data license, and this data's accuracy and recency is tied to GovTrack's.

You can see exactly where Drumbone's data on roll call #22 from 2010 comes from, for example, by viewing h2010-22.xml on GovTrack.

Roll ID

The only unique key for a roll call is contained in the field "roll_id". Roll IDs are a combination of the first letter of the chamber the roll call was taken in, its number, and the year it was taken in.

They are of the format: [chamber][number]-[year]

For example, the 22nd roll call in the House in 2010 would be "h22-2010".

This is different from GovTrack's roll call IDs, and is intended to be more consistent with the Bill ID by ending with the scope of the numbering system (in this case, the year).

General Notes

• For the bills method, you must provide a "session" parameter in order to limit results to a particular session. To only search through roll calls from the 111th Congress, pass in "session=111".

• Roll call votes can be on more than just bills - there are also Presidential nominations, leadership elections, treaties, impeachments, expulsions, procedural motions, etc.

• Many, many votes on bills and other proceedings are not done by roll call at all, but are taken by voice vote. In these cases, there is no associated roll call vote. However, those votes and their results, when related to the passage of a bill, are available on the Bill document itself, in the "votes" section.

Filtering keys

• session - Get roll calls from a particular session of Congress (i.e. "111" for the 111th Congress)
• chamber - Get roll calls from a particular chamber of Congress - accepts only "house" or "senate", and is case sensitive)
• bill_id - Get roll calls for the bill referenced by the given bill_id. bill_id should be formatted as documented here.

Ordering keys

• voted_at - When the roll call vote occurred.

Sections

basic

roll_id

The roll ID as described above.

number

The number of the roll call.

year

The year the roll call was taken in.

chamber

"house" or "senate"

session

The session of Congress this occurred in. For the 111th Congress, this would be "111".

result

The result of the roll call vote. There are many possible results, including "Passed", "Amendment Agreed To", "Nomination Confirmed", etc.

bill_id

If the roll call relates to a bill, this is the ID for that bill in Drumbone.

voted_at

The date the roll call took place.

type

The type of roll call. There are many, including "On the Motion", "Call of the House", "Concurring with an Amdt to the Senate Amdt to the House Amdt to the Senate Amdt", etc.

question

The text of the question of the roll call.

required

The fraction of votes required for passage. e.g. "1/2", "3/5", etc.

vote_breakdown

A subobject containing the breakdown of votes on the bill.

last_updated

When this roll call's data was last updated.

bill

If the roll call is associated with a bill (which can be tested on whether or not the bill_id field is null), this contains all basic fields of the associated bill object.

party_vote_breakdown

An object containing subobjects for each party represented in the given chamber of Congress, with the vote breakdown for that party. Typically, the top-level keys will be "D", "R", and sometimes "I". Inside these objects is typically "ayes", "nays", "present", and "not_voting".

Note* - Once every two years, the House of Representatives conducts an Election of the Speaker, where the votes are the last names of the legislators in question. For the 111th Congress, the keys here are "Pelosi" and "Boehner", instead of ayes/nays/present/not_voting.

voters

An object containing a subobject for every legislator in that chamber, keyed by bioguide_id. This is a large section. Beneath each bioguide_id is an object containing two fields:

vote

"+", "-", "0", or "P" (for aye, nay, not voting, or present)

voter

a subobject of some basic fields for each legislator. Includes title, first_name, nickname, last_name, name_suffix, district, state, party, bioguide_id, and govtrack_id.

voter_ids

An object where the keys are the bioguide_ids of every legislator in the chamber, and the values are their vote on the legislation. The vote values will be the same as the "vote" field in the "voters" section described above.

Full Example