About VIS Missed Votes Report

This report shows how many votes each member of Congress missed in one year. For the purposes of this report, a "missed" vote is a recorded vote on the floor of the House or the Senate during which the member "did  not make his/her position known."  Votes during which the member "paired" for or against, voted present, etc. are NOT counted as "missed" votes.

The 'All Votes' report option stands for all votes available in our database for a given year and chamber. Keep in mind that especially in the past, we only entered in our database the votes we needed for our Congressional Report Cards. As of about 1999, our policy is to enter all recorded votes with the exception of the votes where the outcome was unanimous or very close to it. To find out what votes are in our database, see the List of Available Votes link on the main Toolbox page.

If you receive no ouput and you selected 'only votes in VIS Congressional Report Cards,' it is because we have not yet updated the Report Cards for that particular year. This typically only happens for the current year or the last year.

There are two output format options: tab-delimited and XML. The first row of the tab-delimited report contains the field names.  The MissedVoteCnt and AllVoteCnt fields indicate the number of votes missed by a member and the total number of votes this member could have voted on respectively.