Participation

Participation Rates

How often members are recorded as not voting — and what that number cannot tell you.

By Dallas AI Metrics, LLC · Analysis as of 2026-08-04 · Computed from 440 roll calls across 526 members · Methodology

When a member of Congress is present for a roll call but does not vote, or is not present at all, the record shows "Not Voting." Counting those records produces a participation rate.

It is one of the most frequently misused numbers in political coverage, so this page starts with what it does not mean.

This is a participation rate, not a measure of diligence, effort or character. A recorded absence can reflect illness, bereavement, family leave, military service, official travel or a campaign schedule, and the record does not distinguish between them. Non-voting delegates from the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories are excluded entirely, because they cannot vote on final passage and their absence rows describe the limits of the office rather than the person.

Why the causes matter more than the count

The record is a single flag. It does not carry a reason, and the reasons differ enormously in what they say about a member.

Members miss votes because of serious illness — their own or a family member's. Because of a death in the family. Because of the birth of a child. Because of military reserve obligations. Because of official travel on a congressional delegation. Because of a weather-cancelled flight. Because they were in a committee hearing that ran past a floor vote. Because they were campaigning, including for another office. And, sometimes, because they chose not to be recorded on a difficult question.

Those are not the same behaviour, and no amount of arithmetic separates them. A member undergoing cancer treatment and a member avoiding a politically awkward vote produce identical rows in this dataset. Any reading of the table below that treats a high rate as evidence about a person's diligence, work ethic, or character is not supported by the data and is likely to be wrong about a real person.

What the number can legitimately show

Read as a distribution rather than a ranking, the data is genuinely informative.

The median tells you what normal looks like: the overwhelming majority of members are present for the overwhelming majority of votes. Congressional attendance is high, and the impression of widespread absenteeism that emerges from coverage of outliers is not accurate.

The outliers are real, but they are outliers, and there are usually few enough of them that each has a specific and individual explanation. That explanation is a matter for reporting, not for a table.

1.4%

Median share of eligible votes a member was recorded as not voting

59.1%

Highest recorded rate

113

Members with no recorded absence

Who is excluded, and why it matters

The delegates representing the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are excluded from this analysis entirely.

This is not a rounding decision. Delegates may vote in committee and, in the House, in the Committee of the Whole, but they cannot vote on final passage. On those questions the record shows them as not voting — every time, by operation of the rules governing their office.

Including them produces an attendance figure approaching one hundred percent "missed" for members who were present and working. That figure would describe the constitutional status of their constituents, not the conduct of the member, and publishing it would be straightforwardly false. Their exclusion here is a correctness requirement, not a convenience.

How the denominator is built

A member's rate is the share of roll calls they were eligible for that show a "Not Voting" record.

Eligibility matters. A member who joined mid-session does not appear in the record for votes held before they were sworn in, and those votes are excluded from their denominator rather than counted as absences. The same applies to members who left. Without this rule, every new arrival would appear to have a catastrophic attendance record, which is an artefact of arithmetic rather than a fact about them.

"Present" is a distinct record — a deliberate decision to be counted as attending while declining to take a position — and is not treated as an absence. It is a substantively different act and there are very few of them.

Members with the highest share of eligible roll calls recorded as not voting.
#	Member	Party	State	Chamber	Not voting
1	Thomas Kean	R	New Jersey	House	59.1%
2	Frederica Wilson	D	Florida	House	49.5%
3	Nancy Mace	R	South Carolina	House	40.9%
4	Seth Moulton	D	Massachusetts	House	24.1%
5	Neal Dunn	R	Florida	House	23.6%
6	Andy Biggs	R	Arizona	House	22.3%
7	Anna Luna	R	Florida	House	19.1%
8	Daniel Goldman	D	New York	House	18.2%
9	Ralph Norman	R	South Carolina	House	18.2%
10	Elise Stefanik	R	New York	House	16.8%
11	Dan Crenshaw	R	Texas	House	14.5%
12	Wesley Hunt	R	Texas	House	13.2%
13	Paul Gosar	R	Arizona	House	12.7%
14	Janice Schakowsky	D	Illinois	House	12.7%
15	Andrew Ogles	R	Tennessee	House	12.7%
16	Ruben Gallego	D	Arizona	Senate	12.5%
17	Maria Salazar	R	Florida	House	11.8%
18	Jonathan Jackson	D	Illinois	House	11.8%
19	Randy Fine	R	Florida	House	11.4%
20	Andrew Clyde	R	Georgia	House	11.4%

If you are looking at a specific member

The rate is a prompt for a question, never an answer to one. If a member's figure looks high, the useful next steps are to check when the missed votes were clustered, whether they fall in a contiguous block suggesting a single extended cause, and what public reporting exists for that period.

A cluster usually indicates one event. A rate spread evenly across the year indicates something different. Neither pattern, on its own, supports a conclusion about why.

Every exclusion and counting rule applied here is documented in the methodology. If you believe a figure on this page is wrong, tell us — we would rather correct it than defend it.