Virginia Bill Watch

The Data

Where it comes from, and what we do to it.

No scraping, no guesswork, no paid middleman. We read the Commonwealth’s own record, compile it, and analyze it at a depth that is not possible by hand.

The source

Everything we publish comes from the Virginia Legislative Information System, the official feed that runs the General Assembly’s own public website. It carries every bill, its patrons, its status, and every recorded vote with each legislator’s individual yes or no. During session the state updates it daily.

We do not use a commercial bill-tracking vendor and we do not resell one. The access is free to anyone. The work is in the compiling, the reading, and the analysis: seeing the deep connections in the record that no one could hold in their head.

That analysis is the part that was not possible until now. We put AI across the entire record at once, on every axis we can define: a member’s committee votes against their floor votes, what they sponsor against what they let die, what a bill’s title claims against what its text actually does, how a seat has voted across four sessions even when the member in it changed. One question can cross 1,612,543 individual votes. No one reads that by hand.

4sessions compiled: 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026
31,398recorded votes on bills
1,612,543individual legislator votes
221legislators with a voting record on file

That is 158 delegates and 63 senators, including everyone who has since left office. When a member is new, we can still tell you how the seat has voted. When a member is not new, we can tell you exactly what they have done for four years.

How we read a bill

A bill’s title routinely says the opposite of what the bill does.

This is not an accident of drafting, and it is the single most expensive mistake in this work. A bill titled “limitations on fees” can raise the cap. A bill titled “registration requirements” can repeal them.

So we do not score titles. We read the state’s own summary and, where that is not enough, the bill text, and we record what the bill would actually do. When the record is genuinely unclear we mark it unclear rather than guess. Every number we put in front of a client is read back against the live source before it ships.

Worked example: HB978 (2026) “Retail Sales and Use Tax; taxation on various services”
Feb 9 House Finance Subcommittee #3 Recommends continuing the bill
Feb 11 House Finance Still alive Continued to the next session

Read the headlines and this bill died. Read the record and it did not. “Continued to next session” means it is alive and returns in 2027 with its committee history intact. Its companion, HB900, is carried over too. A tracker that reports bills as passed or failed would have told you the wrong thing about both. Chief patrons: Vivian E. Watts (HB978), Richard C. Sullivan, Jr. (HB900).

What lands in your inbox

One report every morning of the session, in plain English.

01

What was filed

What was filed yesterday that touches your issues, and what it would do.

02

What moved

What moved, in which room, and on what vote. What died, and what only looks dead.

03

What is next

What is scheduled next, while there is still time to do something.

Between sessions, the record: the full voting history of every member on the issues in your charter, and the carryover bills coming back.

Your charter

Before the session opens we build a watch charter with you: the subjects, the code sections, and the specific outcomes that matter to your members. That charter is what the daily report is filtered against, and it is yours. It gets revised as your priorities change.

Session opens January 13, 2027.

Charters are built in December.

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