"Open the door on votes in committees" is the heading to a letter to the editor today in the Indianapolis Star. The letter:
Opening up Indiana government to the people is a very worthy idea, but I'm not sure that video streaming of House floor activities is the best way for the public to get the most information it needs to decide if legislators are doing the jobs they were elected to do.The writer will be happy to know that the committee votes actually already are available online. This may well be new this year; I don't recall seeing them in the past.The most useful tool would be to post all committee votes on the Internet. I know from experience how hard it is to find out if your lawmaker even showed up to vote in a certain committee, let alone how he or she voted. The way it stands now, a candidate could run for office based on a promise to work hard to get certain legislation passed, have that bill show up in a committee hearing, vote against it and encourage other lawmakers to vote against it, and then blame everyone else for it "dying in committee."
No one would ever know they were scammed because no one keeps records on who votes on what. We need House Speaker Brian Bosma and Gov. Mitch Daniels to establish a system in which all committee votes can be recorded and disseminated to the public in a fashion that is easy to understand.
As an example, look at House Bill 1003, the economic development bill. The bill was passed out of the House committee on 1/5/05; here is a copy of the roll call vote.
Today, according to the Action List, the bill was on Second Reading in the House; it was amended on second reading and ordered engrossed. What were these amendments? Looking at the main HB 1003 page, near the bottom, you will see a list of all House amendments filed, and a much shorter list of those passed. In this case, only one 2nd reading amendment passed - identified as 1003-15. The roll call vote on the second reading amendment that passed, as well as those that failed, also should be available.
Problem. I confess however, that I can't locate the roll call right now. There also seems to be a problem with the General Assembly's software, as the entries on the page are repeated scores of time. Hopefully, this glitch will be corrected quickly.
[Update 1/11/05] A reader has sent a little more information.
This is indeed the first session that committeee vote sheets have been available online (although they have been available in past years from the Legislative Information Center, aka the "bill room").
As for how to tie a house amendment to its proper roll call, it is possible, but not simple right now, according to the writer:
It appears that the roll calls listed at the "Roll Call(s)" bullet are numbered according to the number of roll call that the House has taken this session. You may recall, they start at #1 and keep going to sine die. (I think each chamber does about 600 or 700 a Session.)Posted by Marcia Oddi at January 10, 2005 04:01 PM
Under the "House Amendments passed" bullet, the motions are numbered according to the LSA document number assigned to that motion. In the case of 1003-15 for example, that motion is the 15th motion we processed for HB 1003. That motion may be the first one filed or it may never be filed. If you look at the bottom left corner of the document, you will see MO100315. That is where 1003-15 comes from.
If you look at the top left corner of the document, you see that the motion is HB 1003-1. It was the first motion filed for this bill. Rep. Borror filed it today at 9:45am. This was the motion disposed of on Roll Call #9 (The roll call sheet shows "2nd Reading Amend. #1".)