CHEYENNE — The Wyoming Legislature has made considerable progress from the era of typewriters, cranky copy machines and bills written by private corporate lawyers or state agencies.
The biggest and best step has been the creation of the Legislative Service Office (LSO) and its staff, plus the introduction of computers.
The creation of the LSO enabled our citizen legislators to sponsor their own bills with the help of legal researchers and lawyers. This is democracy at work.
Back in the 1980s, there was a movement to install an electronic voting system in the House of the Legislature.
With a membership of 60 or so, the roll call votes were considered to be too time-consuming.
House Leaders resisted, pointing out that then-House Chief Clerk Herb Pownall was so good and fast at tallying a vote that no electronic system was needed.
The Senate, with only 30 members or so, wasn’t targeted as needing an electronic voting system, given its shorter and quicker roll call votes.
Today, decades later, the Legislature has a combination system of an electronic voting system, which is consistent with other smaller legislative chambers, according to the LSO staff and internet sources.
This type of voting system incorporates the accountability of traditional verbal vote-taking with the technology of electronic voting software, which streamlines the tabulation and reporting of the votes.
The Legislature’s Select Committee on Legislative Facilities, Technology and Process recently voted in favor of a system to display roll call votes in real time, perhaps through a new web site link. The vote was a compromise from the initial proposal for a display board in the legislative chambers.
The amendment for the change came from two committee members—Republicans Reps. Dalton Banks, R-Cowley, and Dan Lausen, R-Powell.
They spoke of the need for providing more transparency of legislative action to keep the public aware and informed.
The idea is that real-time voting on a website takes the viewer closer to the actual action while it is taking place.
But, in my opinion, the votes on bills are easily and quickly available now on the LSO web page and the real-time system does nothing more than click it up by a few minutes for a viewer.
But then I have a different perspective. I covered the Legislature before the computer age, when it was a challenge just to get a copy of a voting sheet.
And that is why, to me, the LSO website offers almost all the information I need in quick time, if not real time.
Despite all this pursuit of more transparency, nothing was said during the committee meeting about recording votes on bills in the committee-of-the-whole, which is the meeting of the House or Senate to discuss bills that have been reported out of committees.
The process appears to be sacrosanct as a relic of the English system which used it to relax limits on debate and allow more open exchange of views “without the urgency of a final vote,” according to internet sources.
In Wyoming it is casual: with members going in and out of the chambers as bill sponsors make their arguments.
The votes are verbal calls for aye or nay; the legislator in charge decides which side is louder.
A member who disagrees can call for a roll vote.
But the other bills can die for unsure reasons and no recorded vote to show who voted for and against.
Lots of bills die in committee of the whole and probably should as part of the winnowing system.
But that English relic may need transparency too.
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Contact Joan Barron at 307-632-2534 or jmbarron@bresnan,net
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Mea culpa: A few weeks back I failed to attribute access to a video of a Weston County commissioners meeting to the Newcastle Journal.
