News-Record.com

Update: The AP writes the non-parochial version of this story, which notes Sen. Fred Smith is the big offender over in the Senate.

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This is the kind of story that prompts people to call me naive or cranky or words that you can't print here on a family-friendly blog. At any rate, from the lede of a story in Sunday's paper:

RALEIGH - Rep. Harold Brubaker's desk is in the front row of the House chamber. For nearly a quarter of the 1,400 votes the House took this year, no one was sitting there.

Still, the Asheboro Republican wasn't the most truant member of the General Assembly during 2007. That distinction belongs to Rep. Alice Bordsen, a Mebane Democrat who missed nearly 30 percent of all votes cast on the House floor.

Click here to read the whole story.

Click on their names for more info on Brubaker and Bordsen.

Voting is one of those basic things that legislators do. It's not the be all and end all of their service, but it's a pretty basic measure. And when a legislator doesn't show up to vote, the people of their district go without a voice on the issue at hand.

The data from the story came from a couple different places. But you can find most of it for the House at this link and for the Senate at this link. (Find lots of other groovy data by way of links on this page.)

Update:

• Click here for my House speadsheet.
  
• Click here for my Senate spreadsheet.

Now the first thing an observant reader will notice is that the legislature's "Voter %" number reflects a lot better performance than my numbers. Brubaker, for instance, made 97.6 percent of the votes (or missed 2.4 percent) according to their numbers, a far sight better than my story reflects.

So what gives?

The House and Senate clerks don't count an "excused absence" as a missed vote. I do, for three reasons:

• A missed vote is a missed vote is a missed vote. A legislator may have a really good reason for being away. But when push comes to shove their fanny wasn't in their chair.
• To get an absence "excused," a legislator needs to offer next to no justification. I've never heard of an excuse being turned down. This renders the practice virtually meaningless.
• Even if you accept that an absence is "excused," a legislator missing hundreds of votes is a notable and newsworthy.

Geek note: No, I didn't do all this by hand and I didn't have to take the time to clean up the mess that occurs when you try to copy an HTML table into Excel. (Those of you who have tried it know what I mean. Those that haven't, well, take my word for it - it's a mess).

Firefox has a neat extension called Table Tools that will let you copy an HTML table as tab delimited, making the import process into Excel or Access all the easier.

And once the tables are in a spreadsheet, it's a simple matter to add back in the excused absences.

Finally, for those of you who don't feel like recalculating your friendly local legislator's true absentee rate, I've done them for Guilford and the surrounding counties. The following are the percentage of votes missed by area legislators, counting excused and unexcused absences. The house took 1,400 votes, the Senate took 1,238.

HOUSE
Rep. Alma Adams, D-Guilford, 2.43 percent
Rep. Cary Allred, R-Alamance, 1.86 percent
Rep. John Blust, R-Guilford, 0.29 percent
Rep. Alice Bordsen, D-Alamance, 29.57 percent
Rep. Larry Brown, R-Davidson, Forsyth, 5.14 percent
Rep. Harold Brubaker, R-Randolph, 24.00 percent
Rep. Nelson Cole, D-Rockingham, 7.00 percent
Rep. Jerry Dockham, R-Davidson, 7.93 percent.
Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, 1.50 percent
Rep. Hugh Holliman, D-Davidson, 2.79 percent
Rep. Bryan Holloway, R-Rockingham, Stokes, 0.57 percent
Rep. Pat Hurley, R-Randolph, 0.43 percent
Rep. Maggie Jeffus, D-Guilford, 0.64 percent
Rep. Earl Jones, D-Guilford, 8.64 percent
Rep. Laura Wiley, R-Guilford, 2.43 percent

SENATE
Sen. Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, 3.07 percent
Sen. Stan Bingham, R-Davidson, Guilford, 4.36 percent
Sen. Katie Dorsett, D-Guilford, 8.72 percent
Sen. Tony Foriest, D-Alamance, 0.08 percent
Sen. Kay Hagan, D-Guilford, 1.78 percent
Sen. Jerry Tillman, R-Montgomery, Randolph, 3.31