It was supposed to be the day Chris Sununu nailed down a defining victory for one of his major policy goals. But on May 2, after a year of workshops, a string of favorable votes, and the full backing of Republican leadership, the House pushed Senate Bill 193, the “school voucher bill” into interim study.
In the handwringing that followed, the narrow margin of the decision – 11 votes – surely haunted the bill’s champions in the corner office. But there was another number at play: 62. Sixty-two members of the House, many of them Republicans, declined to participate in the vote.
For months now, attendance levels in the House have drawn alarm from leaders on both sides of the aisle. The perception is rife: Too many of New Hampshire’s 400 House representatives are failing to step up and cast their vote.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said House Speaker Gene Chandler, R-Bartlett. “And I’ve been here too many years.”
House Democratic Leader Steve Shurtleff, D-Penacook, agreed. “We’ve got people who just don’t seem to show up,” he said. “And it’s too bad because the constituents aren’t being served.”
So how bad is it? The Monitor reviewed more than 2,500 roll call votes from January 2009 to May 2018, tallying up the yeas and nays to compare the total participation day to day and year to year.
Here are the main takeaways:
Despite an average 16 percent vacancy rate, these past five months did not clock in as the lowest in the last decade for attendance. That would be 2014, which saw an average of 332 legislators in their seats in any given voting day. This year’s average was 339.
In fact, attendance has long been shaky. In many of the years studied, the chamber struggled to break the 350 mark. Some days have been especially low. On Feb. 6, 2014, 277 members chose to cast a vote – though that came midway through a snowstorm that records show dropped about 10 inches.
The 10-year highpoint: June 22, 2011, the last day of the first year of the Bill O’Brien speakership. A famously controversial budget carrying an 11 percent funding cut was up for final debate. 382 legislators showed up to see it off.
Against such gyrations, 2018 might be seen as tame. But if the vote counts didn’t fluctuate as wildly as other years, they stayed steadily low. Overall, it was the second poorest attendance rate in 10 years. And with 2009 and 2010 regularly seeing numbers in the 360s, this year comes off as especially underwhelming.
Without exception, each session falls into a pattern: after the first year, attendance drops. A typical two-year session will see about a 20-member decline between years. In 2013 for example, 361 voters showed up on average; by the next year that dropped to 332.
It’s perhaps understandable: The second year is an off-budget year, with less to fight for, and without that post-election glow that first-timers must feel.
But that isn’t to say that the decline is consistent month to month. Year two attendance can sometimes follow a “U” pattern, with big-ticket carry-over items from the first session inspiring strong attendance at the beginning and final votes in the later sessions bringing a resurgence. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t follow a pattern at all.
This year, the drop from year to year was more modest – 15 votes on average. But that only drives home a harsher conclusion: attendance for the 2017-18 session was consistently anemic.
For many representatives, whether they show up is an entirely different question from whether they vote. A vote-by-vote tally of any given voting day reveals vast discrepancies between different bills.
Take March 6. On that day, a wildly-contested bill to establish residency standards for voting, House Bill 1264, drew 315 votes; the very next bill, which dealt with political contributions by limited liability companies, saw 271 representatives press a button – a 44-vote drop.
Or Feb 15. With 332 votes, one of the two highest vote-getting measures of the day related to allowing hobby distillation of liquors. Meanwhile, a resolution “condemning hate crimes and any other form of racism in New Hampshire” garnered a count of 303, the day’s lowest.
Day after day, it’s clear that many representatives are ducking the votes they don’t want to put their names next to. With both progressive and conservative advocacy groups circling the waters with threats of checklists and flyer campaigns, sometimes the temptation not to press the button on the seat is overpowering.
That might explain the outcome of the voucher bill: 329 voted in that key vote to push it into a study, but the day’s high was 336. Seven people sat still in the chamber as the vote was carried out. How many deliberately stayed home to avoid a campaign attack is unknown.
Altogether, the numbers paint a less than flattering picture for the third largest legislature in the English-speaking world. Voters choose candidates to represent their interests at the State House and take stances on key issues. Increasingly, those representatives are declining to do so.
Finding ways to address the stagnant attendance record is a tall order – it’s hard enough to simply diagnose it.
“They’re volunteers,” Majority Leader Dick Hinch, R-Merrimack, said with a shrug.
There’s truth to that: Legislators get paid $100 a year on top of mileage, and there are few ways to directly discipline a lack of participation.
But Democratic Leader Shurtleff has another theory, quietly supported by observers on the left and the right: apathy by some representatives on the Republican side of the aisle. Red legislators in blue districts, swept in during a Republican wave in 2016, are less inclined to stick their neck on deep conservative positions, goes the theory.
“Towards the end we had a drop off and a lot of bipartisan victories because Republicans, I think, were more apt not to show up when they may have been needed,” Shurtleff said.
Of course, many of the vacancies are excusable. Representatives fall sick; some resign; some pass away. After opening with 400 members in early 2017, the House ended with 385 members this June, according to the House Speaker’s office.
And other absences are work-related. Serving as a representative means at least five months packed with Thursday session days, not to mention back-to-back committee hearings on bills that can eat up six hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. For those with careers to manage, leaping into what amounts to a volunteer role can involve untold scheduling contortions and personal sacrifices.
Rep. Sean Morrison, R-Epping, counts himself among that crowd. A paramedic firefighter, Morrison isn’t chained to rigid desk hours. But balancing his legislative duties with an unpredictable work schedule is a constant battle. He may have to burden a coworker to swap a shift to make a committee hearing, or turn down an opportunity for two hours’ overtime, he said.
“Doing this as a working person, you lose money,” Morrison said.
As for how to fix the problem, many have thrown up their hands. “That? I can’t tell you that,” Chandler said. House leadership did its best to encourage attendance, Chandler said, through “barrages” of emails. But none of it proved persuasive.
On the other side of the chamber wall, Senate Minority Leader Jeff Woodburn, D-Whitefield, has an unorthodox proposal: hold legislators’ $200 biennial salaries until the end of the session to incentivize attendance. But to many it’s an unserious plan, a cosmetic change to a problem much too deeply rooted.
Still, with an open race for speaker, some candidates are making open promises to boost the turnout. It’s a vow that Chandler, who ran as a placeholder speaker after Shawn Jasper left in November, laughs at. “Yeah, okay, are you going to snap your fingers?” he said.
To Shurtleff, a speaker candidate himself, more could be done from the Speaker’s office, but that accountability ultimately has to come from the voters.
“It’s something that definitely needs to be looked at,” he said. “It’s hard because these are the individuals that the cities and towns send to Concord to represent them, so each member stands alone.”
Perhaps this campaign season, with the filing period wrapped up and candidacies picking up steam, attendance will be on voters’ minds. But that itself raises further questions. Should the state encourage younger, working-age candidates to diversify the lower chamber? Or should it prioritize those who can make every vote, effectively shutting out many carrying the load of a 40-hour work week?
On that, Chandler’s view is absolute.
“If you can’t show up, you shouldn’t run,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.”
(Ethan DeWitt can be reached at edewitt@cmonitor.com, or on Twitter at @edewittNH.)