Senate Committee Kills Vote-Recording Bill

Del. Jim LeMunyon’s (R-Oak Hill) HB778 was killed in the Senate Rules Committee this morning, on a 13-2 vote. The bill would have provided legislators’ voting records on the General Assembly’s website. (The website already tracks the outcome of every recorded vote, it simply doesn’t allow visitors to list the votes by legislator.) Officially, the bill was “continued to 2011″ (meaning held over for further consideration next year) but most bills continued to the next year are quietly killed before the session even begins. At the Roanoke Free Press blog, Valerine Garner talked with Sen. John Edwards (who voted against the bill), about which she wrote:

According to Edwards the Clerk of the Senate, Susan Schaar said this would take substantial staff time to comply with such a bill. In any case Edwards said the House could do this on their own administratively saying “you don’t need a bill … it sounded like the House was trying to tell the Senate how to run its own affairs.”

The Senate has its own website internally explained Edwards that is not available to the public. Edwards wondered why anyone would “want to look at the whole list” of bills and “aren’t people just interested in looking at one bill at a time.”

Note that, despite Edwards’ remarks, the House and Senate use the same computer system to display vote data, and only one system would need to be changed. Note, too, that the legislature doesn’t even make it possible to look at one bill at a time—the public can only look at one vote at a time. To find out how legislators voted on this very bill, for instance, it’s necessary to look at three different sets of vote results. A significant reason that people want to look at a big list of bills, as Edwards is likely aware, is for opposition research. If a Republican was to challenge Edwards, she would need to read through and hand-tally thousands of votes to assemble a comprehensive voting record for Edwards, in order to inform voters whether Edwards’ record matches his rhetoric. (Journalists, bloggers, and constituents all frequently find themselves faced with performing the same task, too.) Putting all of a legislator’s votes in one place makes that process substantially easier.

HB778 was opposed by Mary Margaret Whipple (D-31), Chuck Colgan (D-29), John Edwards (D-21), Janet Howell (D-32), Mamie Locke (D-2), Louise Lucas (D-18), Henry Marsh (D-16), Yvonne Miller (D-5), Tommy Norment (R-3), Phil Puckett (D-38), Toddy Puller (D-36), Dick Saslaw (D-35), Patsy Ticer (D-30), and William Wampler (R-40). The only two legislators who supported it were Edd Houck (D-17) and Fred Quayle (R-13). Although the committee is controlled overwhelmingly by Democrats, this was not a party-line vote: two Republicans voted against the bill, while one voted for it.