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Show Me the Money
Part 6: Researching Politicians’ Voting Records
by Adelaide Elm
In 1956, presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson said, “If we are to begin packaging ourselves as boxes of cereal then democracy is dead, for you could not win the presidency without proving yourself unworthy of the job.” At that point the potential of television as a tool for measuring and targeting specific audiences with carefully crafted messages was not widely recognized. As technology has allowed more sophisticated measurements of the political marketplace, and as more money in politics has encouraged the saturation of the public airwaves with empty or negative rhetoric, candidates have increasingly controlled the process. They know the price they will pay or benefit they will gain for every statement before they make it, and the people whom they want to represent get only the information the candidate wants them to have.
Recently other developments have had an impact on the information available to the public. The intrusion of special interests into political campaigns through expensive independent advertising has candidates complaining that they have lost control of their own elections. The Internet is beginning to shift information control and access away from traditional media sources. News journalists who have always played a central role in gathering and presenting information to the public about campaigns and elections have seen their role diminish as people turn to radio and TV talk shows, the Internet, and the special interest organizations they identify with. At the same time, voting participation has fallen and, besides voting with their feet, the public expresses disappointment, cynicism, and anger at both politicians and the media.
These trends present radio, television, and print journalists with an opportunity to improve both the perceptions and reality of practical American politics: help the dog wag its own tail for a change. Hold candidates accountable for presenting useful, relevant information to their prospective employers when they campaign. And hold those who win office accountable to the people in their own districts, not to other constituencies, for their job performance.
De-mystify the process — not just during an election year, but year-round. Present your stories within a simple context that every person can understand and identify with.
Elected officials are simply the hired help. They work for and should be accountable to the people whom they represent — the citizens in their own districts and states. Political campaigns are nothing but job interviews. However, the resumes candidates present in the interview process consist mostly of negative TV ads, short sound bites, and direct mail pieces that often focus more on the opponent’s negatives than on the candidate’s own job qualifications.
Because individual citizens don’t have the time or expertise to research the backgrounds and job records of all those who want to represent them at various levels, presenting the facts is one of the most valuable contributions journalists can make as they cover candidates and elected officials. Help citizens get the resumes they need from the candidates you are covering — information that is useful, relevant, and focused on their qualifications and not their opponents’. Don’t accept the easy, evasive answers or non-answers many candidates pass off on reporters and the public when asked how they will handle tough issues if they are elected. The public has a right to this information, and you are in a position to put pressure on candidates in your state that will compel them to run issue-oriented campaigns and keep their constituents informed about their actions once in office.
Perhaps the most interesting time to do stories on money and politics is after the elections, when elected officials begin to make policy choices and decisions. At this point you can help your listeners and viewers look over the shoulders of their representatives as often as possible to see how they are doing the job they were hired to do. Although following the money trail with stories that focus on campaign contributions is revealing, if the political landscape surrounding that trail is not illuminated for the public, the trail leads into the political wilderness.
To keep you out of that wilderness, let’s look at how you can track your own congressional delegation’s voting records on any issue of concern to your audiences — without following them to Washington, D.C. Your guidebook consists primarily of the most powerful information tool available — the World Wide Web. Through many of the web sites dedicated to congressional activities, you can start by getting a sense of how the delegation is voting on issues over a period of time, and move ahead to find out what they are doing in the committees they sit on, what legislation they are proposing, and how they voted yesterday.
For example, take tobacco, which figures prominently in health care issues, agriculture, children’s issues, legal and regulatory concerns, to name a few areas your audiences will be interested in. Start by getting a feel for how your senators have voted on tobacco-related legislation over the last several years. Begin at the Project Vote Smart web site (www.vote-smart.org).
Click on “Candidates and Elected Officials,” then “Congress,” find your state representatives and senators, click on their “Voting Records,” and highlight “Tobacco.” You will find the key tobacco-related votes in the Senate over the last six years, with the outcome and how your senators voted. (You can also check here to see if they have received campaign contributions from the tobacco industry, and how their voting records have been evaluated by the Smokefree Action special interest group.)
Want to delve deeper into the wilderness? Check out the Library of Congress’ site, Thomas (thomas.loc.gov), where you can type in “tobacco” under “Search by word or phrase,” and call up the entire text of every bill dealing with tobacco in each session of Congress. Come back to the Thomas home page, click on “Senate Roll Call Votes,” and see how your senators voted on these pieces of legislation over the last eight years. You can do the same thing with the Congressional Quarterly site, Vote Watch, by typing in your senator’s name, identifying “tobacco” as the key word to search under, and limiting the search to anywhere from a week to 18 months.
Or perhaps you’d simply like to know what your representatives were up to yesterday. Thomas has a “Hot Legislation of the Week” page which you can get to through Project Vote Smart’s CongressTrack page. It details floor action on legislation before the House and Senate, week by week, and enables you to click on each piece of legislation for bill summaries and full text. The Washington Post site, “Today in Congress,” details committee hearing schedules, including people scheduled to testify (www.washingtonpost.com).
Although most of the really great political information resources are now online, for those who are still looking for the on-ramp to the information superhighway, there are a number of resources that are trustworthy, comprehensive — and free! This is by no means a comprehensive list of resources, or even all of the most important tools available. However, it offers a good first look and a place to start.
Toolbox for Following the
Money and Politics Trail
General Resources
Project Vote Smart offers several unique resources for political reporters who want to track voting records and other measurements of job performance. The Reporter’s Resource Center, (541) 737-4000, is a library of print and online reference and referral materials, staffed by trained researchers who will do your fact-checking, pull up statistics, refer you to the experts, and give you voting records as recent as yesterday and as far back as you want to go. All research services are free, fast, reliable, and aimed at meeting your deadline. This is the place to call when you are trying to create the landscape in which to place your money and politics stories. Project Vote Smart also publishes the Reporter’s Source Book, a handbook with issue briefs, experts, and sources on all sides of the major issues. The Vote Smart Web YellowPages is a comprehensive printed guide to the universe of government and politics on the Internet. Both books are free and available through the Reporter’s Resource Center. Project Vote Smart is a national non-partisan research organization funded entirely by foundation grants and individual members.
Online Resources: General Political Sites
Vote Smart Web (www.vote-smart.org). Start here because you can get to all the other political and government information online through the links on this site. Project Vote Smart’s entire database is available to browse and download. You’ll find over 13,000 presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative candidates and incumbents’ voting records, campaign contribution histories, evaluations by over 80 liberal-to-conservative interest groups, committee assignments, campaign issue positions, backgrounds, and complete contact information, as well as voter registration and ballot measures in every state. The searchable database allows users to compare campaign positions with voting records in over twenty issue areas. An additional feature, CongressTrack, tracks legislation as it moves through the legislative process, including weekly House and Senate floor schedules, and a Week-in-Review, summarizing floor votes from the previous week.
The voting records database is particularly useful for getting a feel for an incumbent’s voting patterns in key issue areas over a period of time. Key floor votes and passage votes of members of the 105th Congress are available in chronological order, sorted into over 20 issue areas, such as Abortion Policy, Communications, Taxes, Health Care, and Welfare, and by date (year). It is also possible to find out how members of Congress voted by party. Votes in the same categories (as well as campaign finance, special interests’ evaluations, and other information) are available in a database on the 104th Congress, which provides a snapshot in time of congressional activity for 1995–96.
The Vote Smart Web offers links to all the important sites covering government and politics at the federal, state, and local levels. It is possible to link to votes at the state legislative level for all states where this information is available. Under the heading “Other Sources of Congressional Votes,” a wide array of choices of other sites is presented, both to broaden and narrow the focus of searches for voting records. At some of the sites presented below it is possible to find the results of a vote taken yesterday, a committee hearing transcript or the complete Congressional Record.
U.S. House and Senate web sites (www.house.gov and www.senate.gov). These sites are good for committee and hearing schedules and committee and caucus formation.
Thomas (thomas.loc.gov). This is the Library of Congress site covering Congress. The focus is on legislative information, with strengths in searching for bills in different ways (by bill numbers, words or phrases, sponsors, those with floor action, etc.), status of legislation, committee reports and schedules, and a new feature which allows you to download bill text. One of the newer features is House and Senate roll-call votes. While it is still somewhat inconsistent, it probably provides roll-call votes faster than any other site.
C-SPAN (www.c-span.org). Also a good site for votes, though usually not as up-to-date as Thomas. A plus is you can search for votes by subject, month, or member, though user-friendly descriptions are lacking. It is also good for reviews of committee hearings, including the campaign finance hearings.
Congressional Quarterly’s American Voter (voter.cq.com). Strengths of this site include news and analysis from the Weekly Report, committee votes, and member profiles. Most of their best information can be found in Washington Alert, which is available only through subscription. Legi-Slate [now called StateNet: www.statenet.com), part of The Washington Post Company, is a similar site, and a commercial competitor.
Roll Call (www.rollcall.com). This site offers the biweekly newspaper online, with special reports like “The Top 50 Richest Members of Congress,” horserace coverage of campaigns, and the players behind the policy. A special feature is the 1998 elections map for forecasting congressional contests state-by-state.
AllPolitics (www.allpolitics.com). This is primarily a news and analysis site (online through CNN), with links to other news sources, like the Associated Press, Time magazine, and Congressional Quarterly.
The political parties — all of them! The web site addresses for each party can be found in the Vote Smart Web YellowPages. In addition, Ballot Access News (www.ballot-access.org) offers a good nonpartisan newsletter with third party information, giving the status of issues state-by-state.
Campaign Finance Sites
Center for Responsive Politics (www.crp.org). This nonpartisan organization’s site offers the greatest breadth and depth, both in their own campaign finance data and through links to all other campaign finance-related sites. FEC data on congressional candidates is indexed and categorized by industry, special interest, PAC, individual, and in-state and out-of-state sources, telling who’s giving and who they’re giving to.
FECinfo (www.tray.com/fecinfo). This non-FEC site provides extensive FEC raw data quickly and is good for looking at individual donors by zip code, among other things. It shows the occupations of individual donors and to which candidates they are giving their money.
Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org). This organization’s site offers great investigative reports and downloadable databases from state campaign finance projects over the last two years, including Illinois and Indiana.
IRE (www.campaignfinance.org). Investigative Reporters & Editors campaign finance site.
RTNDF (www.rtndf.org). Resources and links through the Political Coverage Project.
FEC (www.fec.gov). U.S. government sitecontaining financial information about candidates, parties and PACs.
Brookings Institution (www.brookings.org). This think tank’s site gives background information on the issue of campaign financing and a view of the campaign finance reform debate.
Common Cause (www.commoncause.org). A comprehensive link to the citizen’s lobbying group against corruption in government and big money special interests.
Public Campaign (www.publicampaign.org). This advocacy group’s goal is to take special interest money out of elections. This site offers articles and information about the campaign finance reform debate at the state level and good links to other sites.
California Voter Foundation (www.calvoter.org). This is one of the very best state-level sites for data on candidates (the Digital Sunlight program, which you can reach directly at www.digitalsunlight.org). (See the next chapter of this manual.) Most information is on California candidates and measures, but some is broader in scope, including the status of electronic filing, and access and disclosure laws in California and other states.
National Institute on Money in State Politics (www.followthemoney.org). A new project of the Western States Center, the NIMSP tracks data on state legislative candidates similarly to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Adelaide Elm is Communications Director at Project Vote Smart. She can be contacted at 129 NW 4th St., Suite 204, Corvallis, OR 97330; (541) 754-2746; Fax: (541) 754-2747; e-mail: aelm@vote-smart.org.
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