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State Rep. Tony Goolsby thinks when Texas legislators' votes are counted, they should be the ones actually casting them.
That seems simple enough, but under a longtime practice, some lawmakers are voting for others who aren't even in the room when the votes are taken. The practice is called "ghost voting," and many of our lawmakers don't see anything wrong with it.
There are any number of reasons a lawmaker can't cast a vote, some of them legitimate, perhaps many others not. In some cases, when a representative or senator is absent, a colleague will flip the voting switch on the absent member's desk, thus casting that person's vote. It is possible that someone not in Austin or even in the state when the vote is taken can cast a yea or a nay. In one case, a lawmaker "voted" several hours after he had died.
Some House members say they trust their colleagues to vote the way they would when they are absent. But the possibility -- and the temptation -- is there to change the outcome of a vote simply by casting votes for absent members.
That's not the way it is supposed to work. Goolsby, a Republican from Dallas, wants the Texas House of Representatives to install fingerprint technology at each member's desk so that only that particular lawmaker can cast a vote from that desk. He estimates the cost of the technology to be about $400,000.
We like Goolsby's idea, but it doesn't go far enough. Every vote taken in either house of the Legislature should be recorded and immediately posted on the Internet. The technology exists and it shouldn't be all that expensive to do.
Last November, Texas voters approved an amendment requiring all final votes in the House and Senate to be recorded and archived on the Internet for at least two years. Goolsby was a prime mover of that effort and deserves praise for pushing lawmakers into being more accountable to the voters.
But many issues are decided in earlier votes, and the final vote is a mere formality. There is absolutely no reason that every single vote taken in the House and Senate shouldn't be recorded and placed on the Internet forever. Two years simply isn't long enough -- that's only one regular session. Voters should be able to go back as many years as they want to check on how their lawmakers voted on any issue.
Too many matters are decided by voice vote, in which no one knows how a particular lawmaker voted. That makes it hard at election time to pin the legislator down on his or her vote.
Lawmakers would like us to believe that they are being open and accessible when they post their final votes on the issue, but that isn't the case.
Texans have a need to know how their state representatives and state senators vote on every issue at every stage of the process. That includes when they don't bother to vote at all.
