Want to quickly and easily find out how your state legislator voted on a specific bill? Or how he voted on all the 393 bills that passed the 2001 Legislature?
Don't bother trying to find it on the Utah Legislature's Internet home page. Depending on what you're looking for, it is either hard or impossible to look up the vote.
Democratic House leaders want to change that. But their Republican colleagues worry about the cost.
The political — rather than monetary — reason for any hesitancy is simple, however: The easier it is to track down lawmakers' votes, the easier it is for potential challengers to criticize them, maybe use some votes to defeat them in an election.
Tuesday afternoon, House Democrats asked the Legislative Management Committee to find a way to "quickly" link within the lawmakers' home page to specific votes on bills. That can be done now at www.le.state.ut.us, but it is difficult and time-consuming.
House Minority Whip Patrice Arent, D-South Cottonwood, said after the committee meeting that the state home page should also quickly link to an individual lawmaker's specific votes on every bill. That can't be done at all on the state page now.
"We should make it as easy as possible for the public to see how we are voting up here," said Arent. "And that means having (quick links) on our own Web site."
The Legislative Management Committee will look at the issue, GOP leaders promised. "But there may be some cost involved" in programming the quick links, Senate President Al Mansell, R-Sandy, said.
"I support the change. But we have to find out" what it entails, House Speaker Marty Stephens, R-Farr West, said, adding that citizens can look up a lawmaker's vote on a specific bill through the online journals of the House and Senate.
That's true. But it isn't easy.
First, a person must search for a specific bill by number, then click on the status to see a listing of what day a bill passed the House or Senate. (The internal codes used to define specific legislative action are confusing, although there is a dictionary to help out.)
To find the journals themselves, that person has to look up that day and read through the whole journal to find the bill and the vote on the bill. The journal lists all the lawmakers voting in that body on that bill.
Even a veteran legislative watcher could easily get lost in the process. And that's the problem, says Arent.
Arent said she was amazed to find out that on lawmakers' internal, private computer network, "I can look up any vote on any bill" with just a click. But constituents — and political opponents — can't get on that system. Legislative outsiders can only get on the public's legislative Web page.
And the state system provides no way to call up a legislator by name and immediately find all of his votes on all of the bills.
To make such information more accessible would make it easier to do what's termed "political opposition research" at the click of a button. In years past, political challengers to lawmakers could spend hours or days pouring through printed House and Senate journals looking up votes of the incumbents they hoped to beat at the polls.
Such high-tech computer searches and links are available today, however, for a price.
Former House member Byron Harward is a private publisher of Utah's legal codes. He has an extensive Web site Code-Co.com that allows clients, for a fee, to search not only the state code but all kinds of legislative actions, including bills and votes.
Harward recently told the Deseret News that he had a hunch legislators wouldn't want certain people to be able to quickly link to lawmakers' votes. And so he provides on his Web site the ability to call up votes by numbered bills for all voting on the bill and a separate search that lists an individual lawmaker's votes on all the bills he voted on.
A former legislative staffer told the Deseret News late last year that several years ago then-legislative leaders specifically instructed legislative Web masters not to include quick links to legislators' votes.
Stephens said he couldn't comment on that directly because he wasn't a leader back then. Neither was Mansell, who was elected Senate president in November.
"I know there were discussions back then about that — who could be helped or hurt. I don't know if the current policy is a result of those (concerns) or came about for other reasons," Stephens said.
E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com