I emailed my State Rep, Carl Sciortino about it at the time:
…The current system may have made sense in another time, but with today’s technology the cost of making this information readily available is trivial and it would greatly increase the transparency of the legislative process. Hiding this most basic of information, makes it appear that you do not want to accountable for your committee votes, which I sincerely hope is not the case. You should be proud of the work you do in the state house and not erect barriers to prevent your constituents from finding out about it.
He finally got back to me arguing that the bill was unnecessary and had been misleadingly represented by the Republicans and by the local press, (including us I might add.)
…Bills are reported out of committees with the committee vote clearly indicated, and any dissenting members listed. It seemed to be a redundant provision, as bills are reported out of committee with the vote clearly indicated, and any dissenting members listed. This is listed online on the House Journals…
I decided to find out whether or not this was true, so I went to the Legislature’s website and looked at several House Journals, but could not find in any of them a list of dissenting members. It’s possible that all the bills coming out of committee that I examined were approved unanimously. If someone with more patience wants to examine this question further, that would be helpful.
Giving Sciortino the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume that dissenting members names are published in the Journal. The website is still a mess and makes it difficult to find information easily. If you want to find out the status of a bill, you need to find its docket number from a PDF of all bills introduced, look up the conversion of docket number to bill number, (also a PDF) then enter that number into a form to get either the legislative history or separate form to get the text of the bill. If you want to find out what the committee votes are, you need to look that up in the journal for the day the bill was reported to the full chamber. Amendments offered in committee and votes on those amendments are unavailable as far as I can tell. For votes of the full house and senate on the bill you can enter the roll call number into a form.
For comparison, I went over to Thomas, which is the congress’ site for tracking bills and searching the congressional record. It’s much cleaner, better linked and better organized than the legislature’s site is. I would suggest it as model for the state legislature. The one thing that was moderately difficult to find, though not nearly as bad as in our case, was the exact thing that prompted this inquiry in first place: committee vote details. These, along with the amendments offered in the markup session, were buried in the committee reports and not linked to from the main summery of congressional actions, but at least the information was available.
This is something that the Left and Right Blogosphere can work on together. Let’s do it.
I’ll email it to Sciortino and post it here when I’m done with it.
It is perfectly true that Committee votes are reported out of Committee with members recorded – WHEN they are voted on in a Formal Session. IF they are voted on in a Formal Session. And even then, it’s numbers not names.
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Exec Sessions are sometimes held right after the hearing, and sometimes months later. Ask Rep. Scortino to look at a vote which has had an Exec Session on a Committee where he sits (if any – it’s only 2007). Ask him if HE can find the Committee vote on the web site, or even the breakdown of how the Committee voted.
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When he sees that you can’t, maybe he’ll be more receptive.
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Kudos once again to Frank Hynes, the only Democrat who ‘get is’!
Since I’m the Rep that seems to now have the luxury of defending this vote, let me offer a couple of additional points.
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First, I know there are better ways to make information more available. I do not pretend the current system is simple or the best we can do. The mass.gov website needs some serious updating, both on the committee level and across agencies. But that doesn’t happen overnight or with a quick vote on an amendment.
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The House Clerk’s office, just in the last two years I’ve been in the legislature, has made strides to get more information online, and to do so faster. For example, if you go to the site for looking up bill history, http://mass.gov/legi… you’ll notice that last session and this session are the first years this information was available online. My point being that it’s not perfect, no even close, but it is improving.
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Additionally, there is an assumption in what is being discussed and reported that legislators are intentionally trying to keep votes secret. I will only speak for myself in saying that’s simply not the case. One comment I included in my response to Marcus’ email was to say:
“While the legislative process is by no means simple or straightforward, I am absolutely happy to share views, opinions, voting history, and rationale for votes with my constituents.” I do so every day, whether people are agreeing with my votes or not.
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Let me give you an example of what I mean by saying the dissenting votes of committees are listed in the House Journal. Take a look at the Patient Safety Act from last session, H. 4965. Bill history can be looked up, and is available at http://www.mass.gov/…. You’ll see on there that the bill was passed out of the healthcare finance committee on 5/18/06. That day on the House Floor, the “Report of Committee” appears on the House Journal, also online, at http://mass.gov/legi…. The report for this bill lists two dissenting members, Moore & Brown.
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There are gaps in this. Sometimes the Report of Committee doesn’t happen the same day.. and you have to know that House bills are usually reported to the House, and Senate bills to the Senate.. and you have to know basically what a “report of committee” is.. and so forth.
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In fairness to anyone trying to trace bill history (including I might add new legislative aides and legislators!), the challenge goes beyond just poor web design. The legislative process is not simple.. it’s pretty messy actually.. and I think the evolution of getting information online reflects that process.
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I’ve gone on too long, but I’m saying all of this to emphasize both my willingness to help constituents (and non constituents) navigate the bizarre legislative process, and my willingness to explain some of the considerations I had when deciding how to vote on this amendment. I’m happy to try to clarify if there are questions!
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Carl Sciortino
I typed too quickly, so one correction, the first link I listed above with the page for searching bill history had a comma at the end, it should be corrected here.
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Also, I should add… I’d welcome the list of suggestions you mentioned, and would be happy to bring them to the Clerk’s office. I was just looking over the fed’s Thomas site Marcus mentioned, and I think it’d be great to get us closer to that!
Add to this the fact that there is NO coverage by cable of legislative sessions, or recording of most committee hearings. While there is a “hit or miss” sort of web cam now, it is not archived, one cannot call it up, and it is not accessible in the way the cable coverage once was. This is not an improvement.
In fact, you are my married daughter’s Rep.
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However – MANY legislators are barely in the building, and have no interest in obtaining Committee votes – especially from Committees that they are not on – for random constituents. You cannot honestly say that you are willing to procure this information for every Berkshire Bob or Nantucket Nancy that may need it, cannot easily get to the State House between 9 and 5, and who have never heard of you.
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Mr. James has made remarkable strides – electronic filing is less than 4 years old. That said – this is public information that belongs on the site without a conduit or intermediary.
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Your niceness and willingness to help is not an excuse for your vote.
What the House Clerk and others interested in this issue really need to do is check out some other states’ websites. The legislative process doesn’t really vary that much state to state, but other states have managed to make it a whole lot more transparent than MA has so far. Michigan and Iowa usually get good marks on the surveys I’ve seen. Fact is, MA is behind the curve on this one, and it needs to catch up.
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This is a REALLY important issue to us in the netroots, and we’re glad you’re taking it seriously. Here’s hoping we can get a serious dialogue going on this.
There are several fairly simple things that could be done to make the website a lot easier to use, the easiest being providing more links between the different section, (like having the pages for a bill’s legislative history, its text and any associated roll call votes all link to each other). Also more use of HTML rather than PDF would be a big, but simple, improvement. As I said in my post, Thomas is a fairly good model.
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The larger issue is determining the best processes for improving the accessibility of this information. It seems the Democrats in the State House felt that a legislative mandate, (or at least the specific proposal that was offered,) was not the best way to go about this. My intention in writing this was not to put you on the spot, necessarily, but rather to try to come up with proposals on how to make improvements on the issue. This problem could be resolved fairly quickly, assuming that there is staff with time to spend on it. It would be a good investment of resources, since as you said, legislative staff spend a fair amount of time working on tracking bills as well, so if one person spends a few weeks getting a nice efficient system, the savings in labor of the staff of 200 legislators would more than make up for the costs of their efforts.