By Colin Brennan
WASHINGTON — Rep. Joe Morelle is asking Rochester-area voters for a sixth term on a simple pitch. “No matter where I go, I want to try to solve problems that people face,” the Democrat told Spectrum News 1 last week.
His Republican challenger, Monroe County Legislator Virginia McIntyre, has a different message. “I really believe that the people feel unheard by their representatives,” she told the station.
A week before Election Day, the Chronicle looked past the campaign talk to Morelle’s record in the 119th Congress: his bills, the 676 recorded House votes from January 2025 through the last roll call on Sept. 16, 2026, and the hometown projects he has asked taxpayers to fund. The vote tallies come from House Clerk records and the bill histories from Congress.gov.
The record shows a reliable Democratic vote on the big partisan fights, a lawmaker who shows up about as often as the typical member, and a handful of narrow, bipartisan election bills that came out of the committee where he is the top Democrat. None of the 38 bills and resolutions he has introduced this Congress has become law.
The bipartisan bill that passed the House
Morelle is the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, which writes federal election law and runs the House itself. His most successful bill this term came out of that panel. The FEC Administrative Improvements Act (H.R. 8738), which he wrote with Republican Reps. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the committee chairman, and Laurel Lee of Florida, along with Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, would require electioneering-communications reports to be filed electronically with the Federal Election Commission and let campaigns make payments by means other than paper checks.
The committee approved it 11-0 in May, and the House passed it by voice vote on July 13. It now sits in the Senate Rules Committee.
“Our campaign finance system wasn’t designed for the digital age,” Steil said on the House floor, according to the Congressional Record. “I thank my colleague, the ranking member, Mr. Morelle, for his work on this legislation.”
Morelle called it “a meaningful, bipartisan bill to ensure that the public receives important information about election-relevant communications.” He added, “As it becomes harder to find common ground in Congress, I commend my cosponsors for their work on this and other issues important to the work at hand.”
Most of his other bills are still waiting for a hearing. They include the Poll Worker Tax Cut Act and a bill to name the post office at 216 Cumberland St. in Rochester for civil rights leader Minister Franklin Florence. The Oversight Committee approved the post office bill 23-15 in April 2025, but it has not had a floor vote.
On Oct. 22, Morelle introduced the Scams Tax Relief Act. It would remove limits on tax deductions for theft losses from fraud and let victims claim them without itemizing. A month earlier he voted for a related bipartisan measure, the Tax Relief for Fraud Victims Act, which passed 408-17.
Attendance: right at the House median
Morelle missed 13 of the 676 roll calls, or 1.9%. The median for the 434 members who served through the period was also about 1.9%, by the Chronicle’s count. His absences were spread over nine days.
Among his upstate neighbors, Democratic Rep. Tim Kennedy of Buffalo missed one vote over the same stretch, Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney missed five, Democratic Rep. John Mannion of Syracuse missed four, Republican Rep. Nick Langworthy missed 11 and Democratic Rep. Josh Riley missed 12.
A party-line vote on the biggest fights
On the 464 roll calls where most Democrats and most Republicans voted on opposite sides, Morelle voted with his party 449 times, about 97% of the time.
He voted against the Republican tax and spending law President Donald Trump calls the One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the House 218-214 on July 3, 2025 and which the president signed the next day. The White House calls its tax provisions the “Working Families Tax Cuts.” Morelle also voted against the SAVE Act in April 2025. That bill, which passed 220-208, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
The White House has made the issue a priority. In a March 31 fact sheet on an executive order calling for citizenship verification for federal elections and new rules for mail ballots, it said Trump “has repeatedly called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a straightforward, commonsense bill to ensure that only American citizens cast ballots.”
Morelle has led the opposition. In September he organized an amicus brief signed by 261 current and former members of both parties, which argues that the order and a related Postal Service rule exceed the president’s power. “Presidents do not control our elections; the American people do,” Morelle said in a release. On the campaign trail he has taken aim at the president directly: “Voting is not a privilege. Voting is a right,” he told Spectrum.
On spending, Morelle voted against the stopgap bill that ended the fall 2025 shutdown when the House passed it 222-209 on Nov. 12, 2025. Trump signed it that night. He also voted against the House’s fiscal 2027 stopgap in July. McIntyre has made shutdowns a central issue. “If the government shuts down and your federal workers are not getting paid, then the same people that made the decision to shut down that government should also not get paid, and they should not get back pay when the government opens,” she told Spectrum.
Morelle did vote for several bipartisan fiscal 2026 spending packages in January. He voted for the House version of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 on Jan. 22, then against the final version with Senate changes on Feb. 3, when it passed 217-214.
On impeachment, he voted in June 2025 to table, or kill, Democratic Rep. Al Green’s first resolution to impeach Trump. He voted “present” when the House tabled Green’s later resolutions in December 2025 and September 2026. Asked by Spectrum whether a Democratic House would spend two years on impeachment, Morelle said, “I think there is going to be accountability,” but that voters’ “immediate concern” is costs.
Where he crossed the aisle
Morelle broke with most Democrats to side with most Republicans 15 times. That included the Laken Riley Act, the immigration-detention bill that was the first law Trump signed in his second term, and the HALT Fentanyl Act, which permanently placed fentanyl-related substances in Schedule I and which the president signed in July 2025. He also voted for a November 2025 resolution denouncing socialism and, this year, the Cashless Bail Reporting Act.
In September he joined Republicans and 139 other Democrats to pass the National Fraud Enforcement Division Act 352-72, and he backed the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act, which passed 417-3. McIntyre has called lowering utility bills a top priority.
But on the PROOF Act, a bill from Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey that would require states to hand over records when the attorney general investigates fraud in federal programs, Morelle voted no. It passed 217-207 on Sept. 16. “If taxpayer money is being stolen, investigators should be able to get the records they need to find out where it went,” Van Drew said in a statement.
The hometown requests
Like most members of both parties, Morelle asks the Appropriations Committee to fund local projects. His office lists 20 community project funding requests for fiscal 2027 totaling about $84.4 million. Fire stations top the list: $21.9 million for the St. Paul Fire District, $15 million for the Lakeshore Fire District and $11.1 million for Henrietta’s Dome Arena community center.
For fiscal 2026, his office lists 15 funded projects. They include $2 million for a heated vendor building at the Rochester Public Market and $500,000 for Rise Up Rochester’s program to rehouse gun-violence survivors. Morelle announced that grant on Oct. 20. “Gun violence leaves lasting scars on individuals, families, and entire neighborhoods,” he said in a release.
The race
McIntyre, who is running on the Republican and Conservative lines, says she takes no money from PACs or the Republican Party. “I want to be independent. I don’t want to be tethered to obligations or debts to the party,” she told Spectrum. She is campaigning on utility costs, the needs of an aging population, term limits and ending shutdowns. “I have a track record right now of keeping my word,” she said.
The money gap is wide. Through Oct. 14, Morelle had raised about $2.25 million this cycle and had about $468,000 on hand, according to the Federal Election Commission. McIntyre had raised about $55,000, FEC records show. The Cook Political Report rates the district Solid Democratic.
The Buffalo Chronicle has requested comment from Morelle’s office, including on his votes on the shutdown-ending bill and the PROOF Act. The Chronicle has also contacted the McIntyre campaign. This story will be updated with any response.
Election Day is Nov. 3.
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