The Shape of Days

Mermer asked,

Is there an easy way to find a legislator’s voting record summary? I poked around the senate.gov but didn’t find it right away. Or, do you have to just look at each roll call vote record one by one to see how they voted?

Why yes, there is. Project Vote Smart is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that makes just that sort of information available to anybody who wants it via their Web site. They also have a hotline (888-868-3762) if you don’t have access to a computer. (If you’re reading this and you don’t think you have access to a computer, please seek professional help immediately.)

Let’s do a little dry run to see how this works. Next month I’m going to have the choice of voting for either Pete Sessions or Martin Frost for the Texas 32nd. Due to a quirk of redistricting, both of these guys are presently incumbents in the House, which means I have access to their voting records via Project Vote Smart.

Let’s pick a hot-button issue for me: abortion. I’m curious as to how these guys voted on abortion issues. (I have a particular vote in mind, but let’s ignore that for a second. Let’s just pretend I’m interested in abortion in general.)

I start by going to http://www.vote-smart.org and searching for the two candidates by their last names. (If I don’t have names I can also search by my ZIP code. It shows me the candidates that I’m going to choose between come November. If I don’t know my ZIP code, the site forwards me to the USPS site where I can get my ZIP from my street address. If I don’t know my street address, odds are I’m not gonna be worried about voting this year.) So I key in “frost” and I get back a set of search results. The results are awfully helpful, too; not only does the site give me back every elected official named Frost, it also gives me all the candidates named Frost, as well as officials and candidates with names like Frost.

Instantly I’ve learned something I didn’t know: Rep. Frost’s first name is actually Jonas. See? Isn’t learning fun?

So I click on the link for Rep. Jonas “Martin” Frost, and I get a page full of all of his vital stats. His wife’s name is Kathy. He’s got three kids. He got his JD from Georgetown in 1970. And so forth and so on. Seriously, there’s a metric assload of information here. Go check it out.

What I’m looking for right now, though, is his voting record on abortion. There’s a link right up top helpfully labeled “Voting Record.” I click it. The results are sorted by category and year. There are, I’m not kidding here, thirty-nine categories, everything from abortion to welfare. I’m interested in abortion, so I click the link for year-2003 abortion issues. (There have been no abortion-related votes in 2004, apparently.)

Upon clicking the link, I see a list of all the abortion-related votes for 2003. In this case, there were only two, both related to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. I click the last one, the vote in which the bill passed the House. Here’s what I see:

Well, lookee there. Martin Frost voted NO on the partial-birth abortion ban. That’s certainly interesting information for me. If I then do exactly the same search on Pete Sessions (search for him by name, select his voting record, selection abortion votes in 2003, pick the passage vote on the partial-birth abortion ban), I see this:

So now, after about two minutes of clickin’ around on the Internet, I know that one candidate in the November election voted for the partial-birth abortion ban and one voted against it. That’s useful information for me. That’s helpful. And it was darned easy to get ahold of, too.

Now, if you’re looking for a high-level overview rather than specific votes, check out the link labeled “Interest Group Ratings.” (It’s right above the “Voting Record” link.) You can find out what different interest groups think of the candidate. For example, looking at this page I can learn,

2003-2004  On the votes that the U.S. Border Control considered to be the most important in 2003-2004, Representative Frost voted their preferred position 10 percent of the time.

This really just scratches the surface of what you can find on the Vote Smart site. Go check it out.

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