Vote information on bills is included in the house or senate journal. The votes of individual representatives and senators are available only if (1) a record vote is requested at the time the vote takes place; or (2) when a record vote has not been taken, a member registers, within a specified time limit, a request to have his or her vote recorded in the journal.
The action history for a bill will provide the date and journal page number for each vote taken on the bill. To find a bill and its action history:
- If you know the number of the bill, use the bill status page
- If you know the author, sponsor, committee, or subject matter of the bill, use the bill search page
- If you know a key word or phrase in the bill, use the text search page
For sessions previous to the 79th Regular Session, use the following procedure to locate any vote in the journal:
- If the action was a house action, find the house journal for the specific date, go to the cited page, and search for the vote information. For a record vote, look for the phrase (Record ###) where ### is the record number given on the action list.
- If the action was a senate action, find the senate journal for the specific date, go to the cited page, and search for the vote information for the bill.
For the 79th Regular Session and following sessions, in addition to the procedures above, the action history provides quick links to certain votes:
- If the action was a house vote action, a "Record Vote" entry is highlighted. Click on the entry. Before the journal for that day is available, (1) an unofficial vote report will display if it is a record vote; or (2) a message that the journal is not available will display if it is not a record vote. Once the journal is available, the link will take you directly to the journal page that contains the vote. NOTE: During 79th Legislature sessions, only passage votes, highlighted by a "View House Vote" entry are highlighted. Information on non-passage votes for the 79th Legislature sessions can be found by using the cited journal page.
- If the action was a senate vote action, a "Record Vote" or "Vote Recorded in Journal" action is highlighted. Click on the action. If the journal for that day is not yet available, a message to that effect will display. Once the journal is available, the link will take you directly to the journal page that contains the vote information.
Also, for the 79th Regular Session and following sessions, a feature has been added to enable the user to find, for a given date, all bills on which "quick-linked" votes were taken.
- For vote actions in the house, go to the House Votes by Date page
- For vote actions in the senate, go to the Senate Votes by Date page