Stand With Crypto Will Score Every CLARITY Act Senate Vote for 3M Advocates
Stand With Crypto announced July 27 it will permanently record each senator's CLARITY Act vote on its public lawmaker scorecards, putting the results in front of 3 million advocates ahead of the November midterm elections.
Every senator's CLARITY Act vote will become a permanent public record handed to what Stand With Crypto reports as 3 million advocates with less than 100 days until the midterm elections.
Key takeaways
- Stand With Crypto announced July 27 that senators' CLARITY Act votes will be permanently recorded on its public lawmaker scorecards, visible to the organization's 3 million self-reported U.S. advocates.
- The Senate must act before the August recess or the bill is effectively dead until 2027-28, leaving developer protections and self-custody clarity as reversible administrative guidance only.
- Passage requires roughly 60 votes; Republicans hold 53 seats and need approximately 7 Democrats to cross over, with ethics disclosure language tied to Trump's crypto-related income remaining the central sticking point.
Stand With Crypto announced on X on July 27 that each senator's vote on the CLARITY Act will be recorded in its public lawmaker scorecards on behalf of what the organization reports as 3 million U.S. advocates. Per Stand With Crypto, every senator will now carry a permanent CLARITY Act entry on their public rating, visible to crypto owners comparing candidates before November.
"The CLARITY Act has galvanized millions of crypto owners, as they eagerly await market structure legislation that will deliver certainty about the technology they rely on," Stand With Crypto said in its announcement. "Crypto voters across the country are paying attention to which lawmakers stand with them in this critical moment."
The scorecards are live at standwithcrypto.org/politicians. The CLARITY Act vote joins an existing scorecard built on lawmakers' crypto-related actions and public positions, and will be among the highest-profile single entries on those records heading into the fall.
The Vote Count and the Clock
The Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act 15-9 on May 14, 2026, per the official majority press release. All 13 Republicans voted yes, joined by Democrats Ruben Gallego (AZ) and Angela Alsobrooks (MD). The bill (H.R. 3633) was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar as Calendar No. 423 on June 1 and awaits a full floor vote. No floor vote is scheduled as of this writing.
That's the problem. The Senate needs to act before the August recess or the bill sits until a new Congress convenes in 2027. Per Galaxy Research, the probability of 2026 passage sits at approximately 30%. Floor passage requires roughly 60 votes under Senate cloture rules, meaning supporters need around seven Democrats beyond the two who voted yes in committee. The primary obstacle is ethics and disclosure language tied to Trump's reported $1.4 billion in crypto-related 2025 income, alongside unresolved provisions on Section 604 developer protections and stablecoin yield language.
The House passed the bill 294-134 on July 17, 2025. The Senate is where it stalls or survives.
What the Scorecard Actually Does
The mechanics matter here. SWC previously applied the same scoring mechanism to GENIUS Act votes. A scorecard entry is not a press release that fades. It stays on the public record, attached to a senator's name, searchable by their constituents. Per a Stand With Crypto midterm voter survey, nearly 8 in 10 cryptocurrency owners consider themselves almost certain to vote, roughly 70% say a candidate's crypto position influences their choice, and 59% identify as non-partisan. That last number is the one senators in competitive races should be reading closely.
The thesis here is straightforward: a senator facing a tight November margin bears a measurable cost for a "no" vote that a safe-seat senator does not. The scorecard is not a threat, it's a ledger. Watch how senators in toss-up races (Arizona, Nevada, Montana) vote against their eventual SWC scores after the election. If those senators vote no and win comfortably, the scorecard's political leverage is weaker than advertised. If they flip to yes, it worked.
The Section 604 developer protection provisions inside the CLARITY Act are what give this bill teeth beyond exchange registration rules. Without a floor vote before recess, those protections exist only as the March 17, 2026 joint SEC/CFTC interpretive release on digital asset classification. A future administration rescinds guidance overnight. Statute requires an act of Congress to undo. Bitcoin developers, node operators, and anyone building open-source tooling are one hostile administration away from the pre-CLARITY enforcement environment if this bill dies in August.
The scorecard's leverage is also temporal. It functions while senators are staring down a competitive election cycle. After August recess, that pressure evaporates until at least 2027-28. SWC is betting the clock runs in its favor. Whether it does depends entirely on whether senators in competitive races decide the cost of a "no" vote now outweighs the cost of the ethics-disclosure horse-trading still underway.
What to Watch
The practical window closes before the August recess. Senators who are undecided face a binary: lock in a yes vote now while the political calculus favors it, or let the bill die and carry the scorecard entry into November. Anyone tracking this bill should check their senator's current rating at standwithcrypto.org/politicians and watch whether institutional pressure translates into Democratic crossover votes before the recess deadline.
Update, August 20, 2026
President Trump brought Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, Robinhood, Nasdaq, Intercontinental Exchange, and other crypto and finance leaders to the White House on August 19 , and used the room to publicly demand congressional action. Trump said, "We need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act, a fair version of the Clarity Act. It's a very, very powerful structured legislation which will keep us ahead of China, keep us ahead of everyone else." That is the clearest presidential pressure the bill has received since it left committee.
Trump framed CLARITY passage as the next step after several actions his administration has already taken on digital assets, including the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve and an executive order opposing a U.S. central bank digital currency.
White House Digital Assets Director Patrick Witt has separately pointed to a "breakthrough" in protecting government-held crypto assets and said work on ARMA can proceed as soon as the CLARITY Act is signed into law.
The U.S. government currently holds 328,372 BTC, worth roughly $21 billion, approximately 1.5% of all Bitcoin in circulation.
The legislative path is now more defined. The Senate delayed a floor vote ahead of the August recess due to partisan disagreements over ethics rules and banking opposition, scheduling a procedural cloture vote on the motion to proceed for September 15, 2026, which requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.
The Senate is expected to take up the legislation when it returns from recess on September 15. The White House summit does not resolve the ethics sticking point, but a sitting president publicly calling out the Senate by name, with Bitcoin topping $71,000 on the same day, changes the political calculus for any Democrat still sitting on the fence heading into that vote.
Update, September 4, 2026
SEC Chair Paul Atkins moved from general cheerleading to an explicit public commitment this week. In a Fox Business interview, Atkins stated that the Senate is scheduled to vote on the CLARITY Act on September 15 and that he anticipates and hopes the legislation will pass the Senate and ultimately be sent to the president for signature. That is the clearest direct endorsement the bill has received from a sitting SEC chair. He went further on the regulatory side: Atkins said in an official SEC statement that "legislation remains indispensable to enacting 'future-proofed' rules of the road" and that "the SEC has and will continue to support Congress in delivering the CLARITY Act to President Trump's desk."
The SEC is simultaneously preparing proposed crypto regulations designed to align with the framework outlined in the CLARITY Act , essentially pre-building the rulebook to match the statute before the statute is law. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has filed a cloture motion to bring the CLARITY Act forward for consideration when lawmakers return.
On the geopolitical side, a significant sovereign adoption data point dropped this week. Federal Law No. 282-FZ took effect September 1, 2026, legalizing licensed crypto trading, custody, and select cross-border settlements, while retail investors face a suitability test and a 300,000-ruble annual cap, and domestic crypto payments stay banned.
The Bank of Russia will oversee the regulated crypto market, issue related rules, and determine which crypto assets licensed intermediaries can offer.
Sberbank projects roughly $46 billion in first-year regulated turnover, with full platform licensing due by July 1, 2027.
The two developments point in the same direction heading into the September 15 cloture vote. The top U.S. securities regulator is publicly forecasting passage and building rules to match the bill before it is law. Simultaneously, Russia, a sanctions-pressured BRICS economy, just codified crypto as a legal settlement rail for cross-border transactions. Any senator still on the fence about whether global crypto adoption is a policy question worth weighing gets an answer from both sides of the ledger at once.
Sources
Frequently Asked Questions
The scorecard aggregates lawmakers' crypto-related votes, public positions, and actions into a single public grade. The CLARITY Act vote will be added as a scored entry alongside existing criteria. Each senator's current rating is visible at standwithcrypto.org/politicians.
The bill effectively dies until a new Congress convenes in 2027-28, restarting the entire legislative process. In the interim, developer protections and self-custody clarity exist only as the March 2026 joint SEC/CFTC interpretive release, which any future administration can rescind without congressional action.
Yes. Section 604 of the current Senate draft contains developer safe harbor language that Stand With Crypto's call-your-senator page specifically calls out. Those provisions would protect open-source Bitcoin developers and node operators from the kind of enforcement exposure they faced under the pre-2025 regulatory environment. Without a floor vote before recess, Section 604 does not become statute.
