This week, Gov. Rick Perry proposed reforms to the U.S. Congress that among other things would result in that institution looking significantly more like the Texas Legislature. Many observers have suggested that is not a good thing for a host of reasons. Here, I highlight one additional negative externality of the Texas model: roll call voting errors by representatives.
During the 2011 regular and special sessions, members of the Texas House of Representatives cast roll call votes on 999 votes that were at least minimally contested (i.e., 2.5 percent of representatives voting were on the losing side). In a total of 1,402 instances, a representative later requested that a statement be inserted in the House Journal to indicate either that, while they voted yes, they had intended to vote no; or vice versa. While these statements allow the representative to go on the record with a different position on the vote (e.g., saying they opposed a bill in spite of the fact that their recorded vote indicates they favored the bill), they do not retroactively affect the legislative process (where the actual vote cast is what counts).
During the 2011 session, the average representative made this type of voting error a total of nine times, with the average Democrat voting in error six times and the average Republican 11 times. However, these averages conceal considerable variation, with a total of 11 representatives (all Republicans, only two of whom were freshmen) voting incorrectly more than 20 times, with the three most mistake-prone representatives voting opposite the manner they intended 42, 36 and 31 times. At the other end of the continuum, a total of 10 representatives (six Republicans and four Democrats) voted incorrectly only once or not at all.
There are two principal causes of these voting errors, each of which is directly related to the extremely compressed time frame of the 140-day Texas regular (in particular) and special legislative sessions. In all, longer and more-frequent legislative sessions would go a great way toward alleviating the time pressures that are the prime source of these voting errors.
The first explanation for the voting errors is the practice of representatives asking other representatives to vote for them when they are “briefly” absent from the House floor due to meetings or other pressing matters. While it is a violation of House rules for a representative to vote for another representative by going to that representative’s desk on the floor and pressing a button below a green (yes) or red (no) light, this practice is not uncommon in Austin. It is reasonable to assume that in some instances these “assisted” votes did not accurately reflect the representative’s actual preferences on the matter being debated.
The second explanation relates to the large amount of legislation being voted on within a relatively short period of time. This reality often results in representatives having limited information on the matter upon which they are voting, which opens up the door to potential voting errors. Representatives might only realize they voted “incorrectly” after having time to later read the legislation or after receiving additional information on the topic from a staffer, lobbyist or fellow representative.
While it is clear that the Texas Legislature does not serve as a good model for the U.S. Congress, it is also increasingly evident that the amateur Texas legislative model does not serve Texas well in many important respects. Here I have presented a minor piece of evidence highlighting a negative consequence of one aspect of the Texas legislative model.
Mark P. Jones is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy’s fellow in political science as well as the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University.