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A friend of mine is working on a book, arguing that the root problem is public votes by members of Congress. Prior to 1970 or so, Congress used secret ballots.
by DennisP 6y ago
A friend of mine is working on a book, arguing that the root problem is public votes by members of Congress. Prior to 1970 or so, Congress used secret ballots. You could lobby them but you wouldn't know whether they voted your way. A new law changed that in the name of "transparency" and corporate donations and lobbying took off in a big way after that.
We insist on secret ballots for individual voters so they can't sell their votes, but for our legislators whose individual votes are far more consequential, we've given up on it.
In exchange, we get to see how they voted and "hold them accountable." But we can't do that nearly so effectively as corporate donors. Most of us don't look at voting records at all; our information mostly comes from attack ads taking votes out of context.
- logical_proof 6y agoThis is actually quite a fascinating note. Thank you for sharing. Is there an eta on the book?
- DennisP 6y agoI don't think so, but he and his collaborators have a website: https://congressionalresearch.org/ https://congressionalresearch.org/
- jdeibele 6y agoI hadn't realized that there were secret ballots before. Recently, the House Republicans publicly voted to back Marjorie Taylor Greene (strong Trump supporter) but also had a secret ballot to back Liz Cheney (Trump critic, voted to impeach, #3 in House Republican hierarchy). It seemed obvious that if the second vote was public that Liz Cheney probably would have been censured and lost her position.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Prior to 1970 or so, Congress used secret ballots. [...] A new law changed that in the name of "transparency". No, that’s not true. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have information like this, the breakdown of votes by members on the 1964 civil rights act. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182 It may be that prior to 1970 or so the number of bills (or the number of bills salient to major donors, or whatever) passed by voice vote rather than recorded vote was higher, that’s a harder claim to assess. But it is certainly not the case that Congressional votes either (1) were ubiversally nonrecorded prior to sometime around 1979, or (2) cannot be by voice vote today.
- DennisP 6y agoLooks like I overstated it a bit. Here's some detail on the changes made in 1970 and later that decade: https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html