Voting and accountability

The caller wondered how North Idaho’s House members voted last week on the bill that would prohibit colleges from banning guns on their campuses.

It was a great question so we looked it up on the state’s legislative website, www.legislature.idaho.gov. We found the information quickly and passed it along. (For those of you playing at home, all of our local representatives except Julie Chadderdon, who’s filling in for her mom, Marge, voted “yes” on the bill.)

But during our search we discovered another terrific tool for citizens to follow the actions of those elected to represent them — and ultimately, to hold them accountable. It’s an Idaho Freedom Foundation website.

Before you conclude that the conservative organization is spinning data to fit its political philosophy, take a few minutes to check it out. There’s a wealth of accurate, nonpartisan data there.

Go to www.idahovotes.org and play around with the site. As one example of how much information is included, we clicked on the link “Missed Votes” and punched in the dates of Jan. 2010 to April 2010.

Know what we discovered? We learned that in the last legislative session, the two members of the House who missed the most votes were both North Idahoans. Rep. Jim Clark, who was on the path to retirement, led all vote-missers with a whopping 124. In second place was Mary Lou Shepherd, who did not answer the bell on 106 of 496 roll calls. (The aforementioned Rep. Marge Chadderdon, by comparison, missed just one vote in the entire session.)

The site allows you to look up voting history by keywords, bill numbers, categories (like “firearms,” “tribal law,” “budget” and so on) and the aforementioned missed votes. You can track the exact voting record of every legislator, including how often he or she voted against the majority of his or her own party. You can learn about specific bills — and find out, for example, the first education reform bill (SB 1068) is the most-viewed bill on the site.

While the site is not quite as current as the state’s site is, it’s abundantly informative. We appreciate this public service provided by Idaho Freedom Foundation and urge citizens to use it.