It's possible that I'm missing something, but I've looked and asked and not found any sign that roll calls for votes on bills are available online for either the New York State Assembly or the New York State Senate.
It's kind of hard to write legislators when you don't know what stand they took, and the Ithaca Journal's "How they voted" seems to be an occasional feature. Even places like the Albany Times-Union's Capitol Confidential blog sometimes tell their readers things like "too time-consuming, sorry". While it's difficult enough to know what's going on in Albany before it happens, not being able to find out easily what has already happened seems very strange.
This isn't, for example, a problem in Dryden, where the meeting minutes list votes, or for the U.S. Congress, which posts votes as a matter of course.
In the hopes that it might work to ask for something that seems fairly obvious to provide - and certainly embarassing to lack - I've written a letter (23KB PDF) to Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton and a similar letter (22KB PDF) to State Senator Jim Seward. I'll share the replies I get here, if any.
Posted by simon at March 30, 2007 12:28 PM in letters , politics (state)