A question sometimes asked of us is, “Do you track committee votes?”  The answer is no and here’s why.

Committee votes are on the Maryland General Assembly (MGA) website in .pdf form.  A scan of the hand written vote sheet is with each bill that gets a vote.

There are two parts to a vote sheet.  At the top is how the chair calls the vote (favorable/unfavorable/etc.):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following is the vote by the committee (only the chair vote shown).  In this example, the, “Yea” is a vote against this bill.

 

 

 

While floor votes are available in a format able to be gathered by our process, these handwritten tally sheets must be collected manually.

This vote is for a bill we covered.

While the Maryland General Assembly website has some good features, it is appalling in vote transparency.  Hence, the votes section of the website.