Group wants more roll call votes

COLUMBIA — South Carolina lawmakers voted on the record this session more often then ever before, but one conservative think tank says it's still not enough.

Many House and Senate members argue that their constituents will have no problem finding out what side of the important issues they came down on, especially after new rules in place this year required roll-call voting on more legislation.

Ashley Landess, president of the S.C. Policy Council, said the new rules were a good step toward transparency, but lawmakers still have too much discretion when it comes to ordering a vote tally or letting bills pass on yeas and nays shouted from the chamber floors.

Landess said she wants to see a bill introduced by Rep. Nikki Haley, R-Lexington, become law. Haley's bill would make recorded voting uniform in the House and Senate and pick up any bills that don't already trigger roll call.

"These votes belong to the people," Haley said. "If a piece of legislation is important enough to be voted on on the floor of the House, then it's important enough for the people to know how their legislators are voting."

Since she first crusaded alongside the Policy Council for this issue last summer, Haley has announced her intention to run for governor in 2010.

Haley and Landess say the bills that pass the Legislature and the money spent in Columbia would be better scrutinized if more votes required roll call.

The Policy Council issued a report recently that found the House called roll 31 percent of the time, compared with about 16 percent in the Senate.

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Many legislators wrote off the report as flawed because the think tank included every vote taken on the chamber floors, even procedural minutiae such as motions to table other motions. The only actions excluded from that tally were congratulatory resolutions.

The group counted 1,291 votes in the House, where only 208 bills and resolutions were given key approval. Even fewer passed the Senate. This year, 120 pieces of legislation made it to the governor's desk.

Additionally, the Policy Council points to a handful of bills that passed without a roll call. Examples include a resolution regarding construction on the University of South Carolina's Innovista campus and a bill that imposes a $10 annual fishing license fee for recreational saltwater angling.

• The Innovista bill was a technical action that enables the university to issue bonds to finance the development and construction of a new business school. This bill supplements a long list of approvals the university was granted through its board, other legislative action, review and authorization by the S.C. Commission on Higher Education and the Joint Bond Review Committee.

• The new fishing license fee was put in place to avoid a $30 fee that would have been imposed by the federal government. Because this bill dealt with a fee, it automatically triggered a roll call vote. The Senate granted key approval for the bill in a 29-15 vote, but the House never took a roll call. Legislative staff said that was an oversight.

• House Speaker Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, and Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, assisted by the House and Senate clerks, make the official call for roll.

Rep. Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, and Sen. Paul Campbell, R-Goose Creek, said regardless of the new rule changes, important and controversial bills receive a roll call because legislators want to be on the record when it matters. As in the past, ordering a roll call on any vote, procedural or not, only takes a handful of legislators to request it.

"I don't know of anybody in the General Assembly who has shied away from having their vote recorded," Merrill said.

ON THE RECORD

The state Legislature took roll calls on more of its votes this year than ever before, but the S.C. Policy Council said the progress is not good enough.

A recent report by a Columbia-based think tank finds that only 25 percent of legislative votes were recorded, but critics say the analysis is flawed. To read it, go to scpolicycouncil.com.

Information on the Legislature's recorded votes also is available at scstatehouse.gov. The search engine works by bill number or legislation topic and corresponding daily journals provide the vote breakdown.

Another resource is Project Vote Smart. The group tracks voting records for Congress and state legislatures. Check out the information at votesmart.org. The cite finds elected officials by ZIP code.

Reach Yvonne Wenger at 803-799-9051 or ywenger@postandcourier.com.