Roll-call votes

In a roll-call vote, the European Parliament records each Member’s vote by name: in favour, against or abstention. A roll-call vote is required, for example, for the final vote on a report; otherwise a political group or one twentieth of Members must request one. How each MEP voted is published on Parliament’s website from the day of the vote, in the annex “Results of roll-call votes” to the minutes of the sitting, and OpenRCV shows it for every roll-call vote of the 10th term.

What is a roll-call vote?

In a roll-call vote, every vote is recorded with the name of the Member who cast it. Parliament’s documents abbreviate it to RCV. Voting takes place using the electronic voting system, and the minutes of the sitting then list the Members by political group in alphabetical order, with an indication of how each of them voted (Rule 197(3) and (4) of the Rules of Procedure).

When Parliament votes by roll call

The Rules of Procedure require a roll-call vote in several cases, including:

• any single or final vote on a report (Rule 195); reports in immunity procedures are excluded
• a motion of censure on the Commission (Rule 131)
• the election of the Commission as a body (Rule 129)
• a joint text from the Conciliation Committee in the budgetary procedure (Rule 97)

In addition, a vote is taken by roll call if a political group or Members reaching at least the low threshold request it in writing. The request must be made at the latest the evening before the vote, unless the President sets a different deadline (Rule 197(1)). The low threshold is one twentieth of Parliament’s component Members, which is 36 with 720 Members (Rule 186). Such a request is not possible for reports in immunity procedures.

Motions for resolutions tabled to wind up a debate, for example on statements by the Council or the Commission, are not reports. They are put to a roll-call vote only if one is requested.

Other ways of voting

Under the Rules of Procedure, Parliament votes by show of hands as a general rule. The President may decide at any time to hold the vote electronically, and if the President decides that the result of a show of hands is doubtful, the vote is taken electronically (Rule 194). In an electronic vote that is not a roll-call vote, only the numerical result is recorded (Rule 199).

Votes on appointments are held by secret ballot, as are votes for which at least one fifth of Members request a secret ballot. Such a request takes priority over a request for a roll-call vote (Rule 198). For secret ballots, the minutes list the Members who took part, but not how they voted (Rule 198(4)). The President of Parliament, for example, is elected by secret ballot if there is more than one candidate. If there is only one, the election is by acclamation unless at least one fifth of Members request a secret ballot (Rule 15).

Where the official results are published

For each sitting day with votes, Parliament’s plenary website provides two documents from the day of the vote: “Results of votes” and “Roll-call votes”. The first lists the day’s votes with their outcome and marks roll-call votes as “RCV”. The second is the annex “Results of roll-call votes” to the minutes of the sitting. It lists, for each roll-call vote, the Members by political group with how they voted, and corrections to votes submitted in the two weeks following the part-session are added to it later.

The minutes of the sitting are made available at the latest half an hour before the start of the afternoon sitting on the next sitting day and are published in the Official Journal of the European Union (Rule 208).

Parliament’s Open Data Portal provides the results in machine-readable form, with each Member’s vote and, listed separately, the corrections to votes. The individual votes shown on OpenRCV come from these data; the section on how current the data are explains how often OpenRCV retrieves them.

All the ways to find results, including Parliament’s own publications, are described on the page Finding vote results.

How to read a result

Every vote cast is in favour, against or an abstention; the annex to the minutes uses the symbols “+”, “-” and “0” for them. Only votes in favour and against are taken into account in deciding whether a text is adopted; abstentions are not. Where the Treaties lay down a specific majority, such as a majority of Parliament’s component Members, that majority applies instead (Rule 194(3), see majorities). In most such cases, what matters is whether enough votes in favour are cast, so an abstention has the same effect as a missing vote in favour.

Until 12 noon on the Friday of the second week after the part-session, Members can state how they intended to vote. Such corrections are possible only for roll-call votes. They are recorded in the annex to the minutes but do not change the result (vote corrections).

Members excused for a sitting day are listed in the minutes as “excused” (Rule 162). “Did not vote”, by contrast, is not an official category. OpenRCV uses it for all MEPs who were in office on the day of the vote and not excused, but for whom no vote in favour, against or abstention is recorded. This also applies if they later stated how they intended to vote (vote positions).

What OpenRCV does with the data

A file often involves several roll-call votes, for example on amendments, individual paragraphs and the text as a whole. OpenRCV shows the final vote as the main vote and the others as sub-votes on the same file. If OpenRCV finds no roll-call final vote on the text as a whole, for example because it was taken by show of hands, the file has no main vote and the list says “no final vote” (main vote and sub-votes).

Each entry in the list of votes leads to the vote view, which shows how each Member voted. Decisions taken without a roll-call vote have no individual votes. They appear in the agenda, marked “not by roll call”, and as a figure in the statistics.

Roll-call votes in figures

The figures are taken from OpenRCV’s data and cover the 10th parliamentary term. Files with a roll-call final vote are all files for which OpenRCV identifies a main vote. Where the list gives shares by voting method, they cover only sitting days with roll-call votes.

• 6,412 roll-call votes in the 10th parliamentary term, on 115 sitting days in 33 plenary weeks
• 788 files with at least one roll-call vote, 652 of them with a roll-call final vote
• Of 12,091 decisions in plenary, 53.0% were taken by roll call, 41.7% by show of hands, 5.0% by electronic vote without names and 0.2% by secret ballot (excluding lapsed and withdrawn items and those with no method given, see statistics)

Latest roll-call vote: 22 October 2026.

Sources

• Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament, 10th parliamentary term, May 2026 edition, in particular Rules 186 and 194 to 199
• European Parliament, Directorate-General for the Presidency: “The Plenary: a User’s Guide”, revision 2024 (PDF)
• European Parliament: results of votes in plenary
• Examples from 22 October 2026: Results of roll-call votes, Results of votes
• European Parliament Open Data Portal (voting data, licence CC BY 4.0)
• European Parliament: data model for vote results in the Open Data Portal

Source: European Parliament open data (CC BY 4.0), prepared by OpenRCV.