Votes by Chamber 2023-2024
Massachusetts is one of only ten states across the country to have a full-time state legislature that meets throughout an entire year instead of only portions of the year. Because Massachusetts has this full-time legislature with large levels of staffing, one would expect they pass a large number of bills consistently throughout the year. However, the data clearly shows that’s not the case. In the chart below, the combined number of votes taken in both chambers of the legislature is low during many months of the year. In addition, it is abundantly clear that the legislature loads up the last months of the 2 year legislative session with a large number of votes in a last ditch effort to pass important bills before the recess on July 31st.
State Senate
The Senate meets regularly throughout the year during the two year legislative session; however, each month in the session can vary widely in the amount of time voting on and passing bills. It’s important to note that these vote counts take into account both major votes and procedural bills. For example, March and April 2023 tallied 3 votes and 1 vote, respectively. While March and April 2023 were in the beginning of the legislative session, it’s clear that even as late as March 2024 there were only 7 votes taking place in a month. Of course, the legislative agenda can fluctuate, and indeed it does. In fact, in this last month of the legislative session, July 2024 continuing through the night to August 1st, a total of 52 votes took place. Nearly a fifth of the total votes in the entire legislative session took place in the last month, and more than 45% of all votes took place during the last 3 months of the session.
State House of Representatives
The House, in comparison, took less total votes than the Senate, with only 199 votes throughout the entire formal session. Less than ten votes were recorded in 14 of the 19 total months within the session. In addition, before the last four months of the session, only May 2023 and September 2023 logged more than 10 votes, with 12 and 23 votes, respectively. Even more strikingly, 59% of the total votes in the session occurred from April 2024 to July 2024, the last 4 months of the formal legislative session.
Not only is this legislative session heavily concentrated within the last few months, it has also passed a markedly low number of votes overall compared to previous sessions. Both the Senate and House have the lowest number of votes compared to the previous five legislative sessions. For example, 1,240 votes occurred in the 2015-2016 legislative cycle, 559 of which took place in the House and 681 of which took place in the Senate. In comparison, in this most recent session, only 448 votes occurred across both houses, with 199 in the House and 249 in the Senate.
It is abundantly clear that the Massachusetts state legislature has a process that is heavily concentrated within the last 3 to 4 months of the legislative process. With this large influx of votes occurring recently, it is important to keep up to date with all of the legislative changes taking place. With MassTrac, you can view the progress, vote results, and bill text of every single bill in the state legislature from the 2023-2024 session to the 1995-1996 session. Catch up with all of the 276 votes in the past 4 months, and more, with MassTrac’s in-depth bill tracking and summaries.
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