About the data

Both are published by the City of Boston. The roll-call pages on boston.gov are the main source, and the site is rebuilt from them every morning. The open dataset, which the City placed in the public domain, covers 2008 to March 2024 and is used as a cross-check: of the 1,179 roll calls in that period, the two agree vote for vote on 1,158. Where they differ, the roll call's page says how. The dataset also repeats 40 roll calls, which are counted once here.

The one-line titles are boston.gov's own summaries of each docket, and otherwise the first sentence of the clerk's description. In March 2026 the City described a test of summary titles generated by artificial intelligence; this site can't tell how each one was written, so every roll call's page also shows the clerk's full description, and the votes and checks use only that and the recorded votes.

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Boston, and for any official purpose the City's own records are the reference. Meeting video is on the City Council's channels; this site links to records and doesn't copy video.

A roll call is a vote in which each councillor's vote is recorded by name. Many Council decisions are made by voice vote or without objection and have no roll call, so they aren't here. A councillor can vote yes or no, vote present, abstain, or not be present.

The records name councillors by surname and use short codes for votes. To join them up, 348 small changes were made across 131 roll calls, and each one is listed on the roll call's own page:

• misspelled surnames read as the councillor they plainly refer to (“Luoijeune”, “Webber”);
• a vacant seat recorded as a vote, dropped;
• a name field holding a stray letter, read as a councillor only when exactly one councillor who voted elsewhere that day is missing from the roll call, and otherwise left unidentified;
• a surname that disappears for more than a year and comes back, listed as two stretches, because it may be two different councillors;
• a councillor listed with no vote at all, left out of the counts;
• a record that lists councillors who appear in fewer than half of the roll calls in the three months before and after it (it seems to reuse an earlier Council's roster), flagged, and those councillors' votes in it left out of their voting records. 24 records are flagged this way.

No vote is changed, added or removed beyond these.

Most records end with the clerk's tally, such as “yeas 12, nays 1 (Murphy)”. Each record's listed votes are compared with its own stated tally: the counts, and the names where the tally names them. Of 1,530 records that state a tally, 84 don't match. They're marked on the site and gathered under Contradictions, with both versions shown.