After using the General Assembly Vote Tracker last night to do a basic analysis of the 10 Democrats that voted for Republican Speaker of the House Candidate David Ralston, today I decided to expand that research and look at the entire General Assembly.
For those unfamiliar with my methodology with this analysis, it is very straightforward: First, I recorded all votes directly from the LEGIS website into an Excel spreadsheet. Then, I removed all attendance votes. Next, I did the initial analysis last night where I convert all yea votes to 1, all nay votes to -1, all no votes and excused votes to zero, and sum the total for each member of the General Assembly. I call this resulting number the “Agreeability Index”, since it basically indicates how much any particular legislator votes yes on the issue at hand. Possible scores are in the range of +/- the total number of votes in question. For example, in the Senate the range was -429 to +429. A -429 score would mean that the Senator in question was present for every single vote and voted nay every single time. Similarly, a +429 score would mean that the Senator was present for every vote and voted yea every single time. A zero score is interesting in that it could be one of two things: it could mean that the Senator was present for every single vote, and voted yea half the time and nay the other half, or it could mean that the Senator missed every single vote. The Agreeability Index alone can not make this determination, hence the need for a second figure.
I call this second figure the “Attendance Factor”, and its methodology is even more straightforward than that of the Agreeability Index. For the Attendance Factor, I simply remove all yea and nay votes and convert both no votes and excused votes to 1, then sum the totals for each legislator. An Attendance Factor of zero would mean that the legislator in question was present for every vote, and an Attendance Factor of the number of votes would mean that the legislator missed every single vote. Thus, when we have an Agreeability Index of zero, we can know via the Attendance Factor if the legislator in question missed every vote, or simply voted yea exactly 50% of the time with all other votes being nay.
Enough of the boring stuff though (even though I personally find it fascinating 
). Y’all want to know what all this means, what I have proof of, right? That’s the whole reason you’re reading this post titled “It’s Nice to Have Proof”? (You know what’s coming… the “Continue Reading” link! )
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