A public peek

Freshman lawmaker Kevin Glynn ran right at Augusta’s legislative machinery during his first week in office, and it’s hard to say who got the better of the encounter. The South Portland Republican wanted all final votes to be taken by roll call, so that a record of who voted for what would be easily available to the public. The intention was honorable, but the details need a good deal of work.

Legislators vote in one of three ways: bills are said to go under the hammer when the speaker of the House fails to get a response upon asking whether anyone has an objection to the legislation; they are voted on by division when a simple total of the yeas and nays are counted; and they are tallied through a roll call in which each member’s vote is identified. Rep. Glynn proposed, first through a House order and now through a bill, that final enactment of all bills be taken by a roll-call vote.

It is difficult to object to the public knowing how a member of the Legislature voted on a specific issue, yet legislators indefinitely postponed (a gentle way to kill) action on the House order, 108-30, last week primarily because of the amount of time roll-call votes would consume in the few months the Legislature is in session. The fact that lawmakers, with just a little help from party members, can ask for a roll-call vote anytime they feel it necessary was a second cause for defeating the order.

These are good reasons for Rep. Glynn to modify his bill. He could keep the spirit of increased public accountability and still exempt bills that go under the hammer — lawmakers are tacitly voting yes for these measures so their votes are, in effect, already being recorded. His legislation could also be improved if it distinguished between the tally for division votes and those for a roll-call vote.

Lawmakers are loathe to admit it, but on issues that are minor or mere house-keeping — and there are many; too many, in fact — they don’t vote. Perhaps they’re working on other legislation, attending a committee hearing, yukking it up with constituents or having a cigarette outside. As long as no one is counting the specific votes and the outcome of the issue is known, they skip votes and the public is none the wiser.

A roll-call vote, however, would mean that they had to be there, either because the outcome was in doubt or because missing it would look bad on their legislative records. Of the 1,018 final enactors considered in the 118th Legislature, 112 were taken by roll call. Of the total, several hundred were decided by division, an unwieldy number to convert to roll call. But by making a specific count of division votes without the bell-ringing attendance demand of a roll-call vote, lawmakers can still decide whether a vote demands their attendance without jeopardizing their roll-call records.

One positive side effect of slowing down the legislative process through Rep. Glynn’s bill is that it might reduce the avalanche of minor bills that overwhelm the process. But a lawmaker who wanted an even simpler method for doing that ought to look into making the list of legislative resolutions widely available to public scrutiny. The sunlight on these proposals would surely eliminate the silliest of the batch.

Legislative resolutions are early versions of bills, resolves and orders — everything the Legislature might vote on. It will likely have well over 3,000 of these by the time the session ends next year, and keeping track of who is advocating for what is not easy.

At least it is not easy for the public. Government officials and those in the know can ask for the list of LRs, currently 230 pages long, and a very helpful person will print one out from a computer copy and mail it. But try to find the document on the state’s web page. It’s not there.

This won’t make or break the budget, but if state government is willing to go through the time and expense of mailing a copy of the LRs, it should be able to let the public see the document through the less-expensive and quicker means of a computer.

And if shortcomings in the State House communications network are what keeps the public from easily accessing this information, a legislator who has hands-on experience with Augusta machinery — say, Rep. Glynn — should be able to fix the problem in no time.