How the council votes are counted

Every vote comes from the City Clerk's eLMS API, the City of Chicago's public record of council and committee actions. The Clerk's own "Attendance and Divided Roll Call" reports, published after each meeting, are used as an audit check against what's ingested here — they aren't the source itself.

A vote counts as divided — worth ingesting at all — when it isn't unanimous: at least one member voted Nay, or at least one was Not Voting, Absent, Recused, or in a vacant seat. A unanimous roll call is skipped entirely.

Which divided votes are Mayor Johnson agenda items, which five of those are the Top 5, and which side the mayor took on each are Larry's own editorial judgments, made by hand in the review queue — none of it is automated or inferred from the vote itself.

"With the Mayor" percentages count only votes cast for or against his position; absences and non-votes are left out of both the numerator and the denominator. The "Missed" tile on a ward page is the one figure that counts them: absences and non-votes as a share of every published vote that ward was recorded on.

Both floor votes and committee votes are ingested, and each is labeled by the body that took it on the council timeline and in a ward's vote record.

A ward's vote record and the council timeline show every published vote, back to May 1, 2022 — one year before Mayor Johnson's May 15, 2023 inauguration, which is marked in the timeline. The Top-5 council average counts votes from the inauguration onward.

Records were last ingested Oct 28, 2026.