Leadership and Civic Engagement, Policy Updates
Do You Know How Your Elected Officials Vote?
by WREN Staff on Jul 6, 2017
Do you know that you can access your South Carolina legislators’ voting records by visiting the South Carolina Legislature website? Accessing this information is the first step in holding lawmakers accountable to the needs of women, girls, and families in our state.
There are two ways to look up votes on the Statehouse website. The first way is to look up the vote by the specific legislator and the second is to look up the vote summary on the specific bill (for a list of WREN’s priority bills, click here). In this blog, we are going to show you how to find specific legislators’ voting records so you can see how the representatives and senators from your district are voting on the issues that you care about.
1) To find a vote from a specific legislator first go to http://www.scstatehouse.gov/, then at the bottom center of the homepage there is a box that says “Legislative Voting Record.” You can select the legislator name in the drop-down menu.
2) Once the name is selected, hit the button labeled “Get Voting Record,” and you will be taken to a page with their specific voting information. All of the bills that they have voted on will be listed on this page, so to narrow your search you will use the drop-down box that says “all bills” and pick the specific bill number from the listings. You must hit the “submit” button after making the selection to be taken to that specific voting record.
3) Once on the specific voting record page, you can see what their vote was every time there was a voting motion on the floor. The website will indicate in green letters if the vote was AYE and red letters if their vote was NAY. That page also includes the total vote count for the motion and whether or not it passed or failed.
Note that the Statehouse website does not publish the votes that occur in subcommittee or full committee. You can always contact the staff for the committee that a bill went through to get the exact vote count.
Using this information, you can see how your district’s lawmakers vote on issues that impact the women in our state and contact them about their voting records. Stay tuned in the coming months for updates on WREN’s trainings and events around the state!