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State lawmakers voting records difficult to track

TALLAHASSEE - Florida lawmakers will cast thousands of votes in the next two months, but holding them accountable can be an arduous task.

Despite millions of tax dollars lawmakers spent on a sophisticated computer system, voters will be hard pressed to track what their elected senators and representatives do during the 2004 session, which begins Tuesday.

"Every now and then you wonder, did they do this on purpose?" said Susie Caplowe, an environmental activist who publishes an annual legislative scorecard. "The legislators don't want anyone to know what they are doing."

Caplowe relies on old-fashioned shoe leather, scurrying from committee to committee, picking up intelligence on amendments proposed and scrapped, deals cut and broken and, finally, votes cast.

"We just have to be very diligent during session about picking up all the committees," Caplowe said.

Legislative Web sites are loaded with photos, legislative biographies bursting with past accomplishments, kids pages, lobbyist phone numbers.

You can even get detailed information about bills, if you know what you're looking for.

But getting a list of every vote a lawmaker cast? Forget it.

You'd have to comb through bound copies of legislative journals looking for bills that deal with specific topics.

Scorecard keepers like Caplowe say this keeps information out of the hands of citizens and potential Election Day opponents alike.

Lawmakers say voting records can be deceiving.

Sometimes lawmakers vote for a bill in a committee as a courtesy to the bill's sponsor, even though they plan to vote against it later.

In a system that historically has relied on decorum and tradition, lawmakers often are loathe to kill a bill before its sponsor has had the chance to pitch it before all of his or her colleagues on the floor.

"A lot of times you'll hear members say, "I have problems with this bill but I'm going to vote for it in committee and give the sponsor a chance to fix it,' " said Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey.

"The bill may be quite different from the first committee to the last committee to the Senate floor," Fasano said. Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, said he doesn't oppose giving citizens easier access to legislative voting records. But he said he questions the usefulness of such information without knowing a legislator's intent.

Even report cards that business and environmental groups put out have limited value because they don't tell the whole story, he said. "I don't put a lot of credence in those because they are a Rorschach test," Gelber said. People reading them have to fill in the context themselves, often with inaccurate results. Sometimes lawmakers vote no because the bill is a "peanut butter and mayonnaise bill," two things that are good separately but not together.

"I vote against the budget every year. Does that mean I'm opposed to spending $20-billion on education? No. It means I want to spend more," Gelber said.

"The legislative process is a fluid, asymmetrical process in which context is everything," Gelber said.

Rep. Heather Fiorentino, R-New Port Richey, recalled an election opponent of hers who used a committee vote against her. The issue was whether to allow offshore drilling, but the amendment would have extended Florida's coastal waters some 150 miles, she said.

"They said I voted against stopping drilling in Florida," Fiorentino said. "I would have incorporated Cuba into our waters."

Fiorentino also opposes allowing high school students to graduate with just 18 credits. She voted against this twice in committee last year. But then the issue got tacked onto a much larger education bill that was important to the state, so Fiorentino voted for the entire bill.

Anyone simply looking at that vote, however, would think she supported the 18-credit graduation issue, she said.

Paul Ledford assembles a scorecard of lawmakers' business-friendly - or unfriendly - votes every year for the Florida Chamber of Commerce. He's not sympathetic to lawmakers' complaints.

"That's just one of the hazards of leadership," Ledford said. He pays close attention to committee votes. He especially notes how lawmakers vote on controversial amendments interest groups try to tack onto bills during committee hearings, which are less visible than floor debates because so many committees meet at the same time.

But diligence can be stymied by what Caplowe and other scorekeepers say is an increasing number of committee voice votes. That's when lawmakers simply shout out "yay" or "nay" and the committee chairman calls the vote. No written record is kept.

"More and more there's less accountability because lawmakers are doing voice votes," Caplowe said. By the time a bill reaches a chamber floor, the votes often are near unanimous because the real issues have been worked out in committee.

Still, scorecard keepers say their systems are less labor intensive now than in the past, before state officials put information online. Both rely on LobbyTools, a private company that tracks legislation, newspaper articles, committee briefings and even alerts subscribers to legislators' birthdays.

But it isn't free. LobbyTools CEO John Iarussi estimates the average client pays $2,600 a year.

Iarussi can customize a search to find out a lawmaker's voting record back to 1999, when the company was founded. LobbyTools can do that because it takes all the information it gets from the state and feeds it into its database.

And despite the millions spent by the state to improve technology and voter access to legislative documents, much of the raw material LobbyTools collects is on paper, particularly at the committee level. Iarussi says he can't rely solely on legislative Web sites because they can be incomplete.

"It takes a couple of trucks to move the paper" out of his office at the end of a session, Iarussi said.

While not overtly critical of the state's legislative Web sites, Iarussi said he's had problems in the past, particularly with the House Web site, which has been the subject of litigation for months.

"I think, frankly, we do a lot better with a lot less . . . There's this intent to build better, stronger, bigger mousetraps, but that comes at the cost of consistency," Iarussi said.

"The House is a moving target, whereas the Senate we can usually rely on," he said. House Speaker Johnnie Byrd's office did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokeswoman for Senate President Jim King said the Senate would consider adding a feature that allowed a search of individual senators' voting records if senators requested it.

Sen. Mike Fasano said he thinks putting voting history directly into the hands of constituents is a good thing, even though a simple vote may not tell the whole story.

State officials could fix that by building in a link to any bill in question, including its amendments and staff analysis.

"Anything we can do to make access to government better and more open I'd support," Fasano said.