Sen. Rufus Choate
Former Senator for Massachusetts
Choate was a senator from Massachusetts and was a Whig. He served from 1841 to 1845.
He was previously the representative for Massachusetts’s 2nd congressional district as a Whig from 1833 to 1835; and the representative for Massachusetts’s 2nd congressional district as a Whig from 1831 to 1833.
![Photo of Sen. Rufus Choate [W-MA, 1841-1845]](/static/legislator-photos/402514-200px.jpeg)
Voting Record
Missed Votes
From Mar 1841 to Mar 1845, Choate missed 216 of 1,149 roll call votes, which is 18.8%. This is on par with the median of 16.5% among the lifetime records of senators serving in Mar 1845. The chart below reports missed votes over time.
We don’t track why legislators miss votes, but it’s often due to medical absenses, major life events, and running for higher office.
Primary Sources
The information on this page is originally sourced from a variety of materials, including:
- unitedstates/congress-legislators, a community project gathering congressional information
- United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990 by Howard L. Rosenthal and Keith T. Poole.
- Martis’s “The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress”, via Keith Poole’s roll call votes data set, for political party affiliation for Members of Congress from 1789 through about year 2000
- Biographical Directory of the United States Congress for the photo
