Illinois General Assembly Floor Transcripts

Search 55 years of House & Senate floor debate in seconds — no more digging through PDFs, one session at a time

This site makes the Illinois General Assembly's own published floor-debate transcripts full-text searchable — every recorded House and Senate floor session from 1971 through today, broken into individual speaker "turns" (who spoke, and what they said) so you can search across five decades of debate at once.

6,079
transcripts
2.38M
speaker turns
1971–2026
years covered
~45%
turns matched to a name
3,677
journal days (GA91–104)
21,624
Senate roll-call votes
How to use this site
1
Search a word, phrase, or bill number in the box below — every matching speaker turn since 1971 comes back at once.
2
Narrow it down with the filters — chamber, session, party, or a specific legislator's name.
3
Click Browse Legislators above to skip straight to everything one person has said on the floor, or Search Journals to search the official procedural record (bill actions, roll calls, resolutions) alongside the debate.
Try a search:
About the data, matching, and limitations

Where possible, each speaker has been cross-referenced against official membership rosters to attach their real name and party. That resolution is strongest for the 93rd General Assembly onward (2003–present, ~89% of turns matched to a named legislator); for the 77th–92nd (1971–2002) no roster cross-reference has been built yet, so those turns display the speaker label exactly as it appears in the original transcript (e.g. a raw name or a role like "PRESIDING OFFICER"). Chamber staff — Clerks of the House and Secretaries of the Senate — are resolved separately and shown without a party.

Source text is OCR'd from scanned records for older sessions, so occasional transcription errors are expected. This runs entirely in your browser: the search box below queries the database directly over the network, only pulling in the small portion of it your search actually touches — nothing is uploaded anywhere.

The Search Journals tab searches a separate corpus: the official House & Senate Journals (General Assemblies 91–104, 1999–present) — the procedural record of bill actions, roll calls, committee reports, and resolutions, as distinct from the Transcripts' verbatim record of floor debate. All born-digital text (no OCR needed for this corpus).

The Senate Votes tab is structured data extracted from those Journals: 21,624 Senate roll-call votes on bill passage (GA91–104), each with the full Yea/Nay breakdown by member. Senate-only — the House Journals only print an aggregate tally plus a roll-call reference number for bill votes, not the individual member list, so House votes aren't extractable from what's published there. Member names are cross-referenced against the roster for GA93 onward (~97% resolved); GA91–92 show the vote but not a matched identity, for the same reason noted above for Transcripts.

Using this data — license, citation, and downloads

Source & rights: The underlying Illinois General Assembly floor transcripts and House & Senate Journals are public records published by the State of Illinois. The derived database built from them here — speaker-turn segmentation, roster-based name/party matching, and structured vote extraction — is released under a CC0 1.0 public-domain dedication — CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication). No rights reserved; use it for anything, attribution appreciated but not required.

How to cite: a copyable citation format —

Illinois General Assembly Floor Transcripts [database]. Compiled from ilga.gov. Accessed <date>. https://www.openilga.org/

Download the data: these are plain SQLite files, queryable directly with any SQLite client. site.db contains the transcripts and speaker_turns tables plus an FTS5 full-text index.

site.db (≈1.6 GB) · journals.db (≈371 MB) · votes.db (≈100 MB)

Search Transcripts full-text searches every recorded floor speech. Browse Legislators lists everyone with a resolved identity and shows a running feed of everything they've said. Search Journals searches the official procedural record (bill actions, roll calls, resolutions).
Searches the full text of every speaker's turn. Multiple words match turns containing all of them. Use the filters below to narrow by chamber, session, party, or legislator.
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Searches the full text of every daily House & Senate Journal, GA91–104 (1999–present) — the official procedural record (bill actions, roll calls, committee reports, resolutions), distinct from the Transcripts' record of what was said on the floor.
Structured Senate roll-call votes on bill passage, GA91–104 — search by bill number for the full roll call, or by a senator's last name for every vote they cast. Senate only (see "About the data" above for why).