Analysis · October 21, 2026

Delegates and the territories: why their grades look different

Six members of the House represent DC and the U.S. territories. They can't vote on final passage of bills, which makes their attendance scores swing wildly. Here is how to read their report cards.

About 4 million Americans live in the District of Columbia and the five inhabited U.S. territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. None of them has a voting member of Congress. Instead, each elects one member of the House who can do almost everything other representatives do, except cast a vote on the final passage of legislation. Congress Report Card grades these six members too, but their report cards need to be read differently.

What delegates can and can't do

Delegates (and Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner, who has the same role but a four-year term) can introduce bills, cosponsor bills, speak on the House floor, and serve and vote on committees. They cannot vote on the final passage of bills in the full House. When House rules allow, they may vote in the Committee of the Whole, the procedure the House uses to debate and amend many bills, but those votes can't decide an outcome on their own.

As a result, delegates are eligible for only a small fraction of House roll calls. In the 119th Congress, each delegate has been eligible for 85 roll-call votes, compared with 674 for voting members.

The six report cards

Four of the six delegates have an F, a much higher share than among voting members. That is almost entirely because of how attendance is scored when the number of eligible votes is small.

Why small numbers swing so much

The attendance score runs from 0 at 85% attendance to 100 at 100%. For a voting House member with 674 eligible votes, each missed vote costs about 0.15 percentage points of attendance, or 1 point on the attendance score. For a delegate with 85 eligible votes, each missed vote costs about 1.2 percentage points of attendance, or nearly 8 points on the score.

So a delegate who misses 13 of 85 votes has an attendance rate just under 85% and an attendance score of 0. A voting member would have to miss about 101 votes to reach the same place. Pablo José Hernández of Puerto Rico has missed only 5 votes, fewer than the typical voting member's 12, but the attendance score is about 61 because those 5 votes are a larger share of a small total.

Congress Report Card counts delegates only on the votes they are allowed to cast. That is the fairest way to measure their attendance, but it means their scores are much more sensitive to each absence. Readers comparing a delegate's grade with a voting member's should keep that in mind.

The bill scores tell a different story

On bills, delegates hold their own. Their bill scores are ranked against the whole House, and several of them are near or above the middle.

Eleanor Holmes Norton stands out. Norton has sponsored 95 bills, among the most in the House, and cosponsored 1,686, far more than any other member of Congress. That gives Norton top scores on both bill measures and the only grade among the delegates in the C range or above. Because Congress holds final authority over the District's affairs, part of Norton's work concerns the District's own government; one of Norton's bills that advanced this Congress deals with how D.C. Council legislation is transmitted to Congress.

Several of the other delegates' bills that advanced deal directly with their home jurisdictions: the Northern Mariana Islands Small Business Access Act from Kimberlyn King-Hinds, the Territorial Student Access to Higher Education Act from James C. Moylan, a bill designating the Christiansted Bandstand in the Virgin Islands from Stacey E. Plaskett, and the South Pacific Tuna Treaty Act from Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, which concerns the tuna fishery that is central to American Samoa's economy. Moylan and King-Hinds each have two bills that passed the House, and Plaskett also has two.

Distance and attendance

The data doesn't record why any member missed a vote, and Congress Report Card doesn't guess. But it is worth knowing that the territories are far from Washington. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are more than 7,000 miles away and many time zones ahead, and American Samoa is roughly 7,000 miles away in the South Pacific. Travel between home and the Capitol can take a full day or more each way. Delegates also have to divide their time between Washington and constituents who cannot easily visit them.

None of that changes the record, and some delegates from distant territories have strong attendance. It is context that readers can weigh when looking at a delegate's grade.

How delegates appear on the site

Delegates are listed with the rest of the House on the home page, and their report cards explain the limit on their voting. Because each jurisdiction has only one member, DC and the territories don't have state pages and aren't included in the state ranking. The states page lists all six delegates separately with links to their report cards.

The question of whether DC and the territories should have full voting representation is a long-running political debate. Congress Report Card takes no position on it. The grades simply measure what each delegate has done with the powers the House gives them.

Figures are from the Congress Report Card data as of October 21, 2026. Grades change as Congress votes, so the numbers on member pages may have moved since. How grades are calculated.