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Voting in Congress
Every law must be voted on by the House and Senate. Although many votes are taken informally, with verbal yeas and nays and no record of individual positions, senators and representatives cast formal floor votes at least several hundred times a year. On those votes, each individual position is recorded in the congressional record. Months and sometimes years of work in committees come to fruition, or fail, as the House and Senate vote.
The House and Senate have each developed their own procedures for voting. Guiding them in many cases are voting rules spelled out in the Constitution. Most specific are requirements for roll-call votes, or what the Constitution calls the “yeas and nays.” One rule is aimed at preventing secret ballots: “The yeas and nays of the members of either house on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the Journal.” For votes to override presidential vetoes, the Constitution is even more specific: “In all such cases the votes of both houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the Journal.”
Amendments, p. 10
Bells, Legislative, p. 40
Committee of the Whole, p. 112
Conservative Coalition, p. 141
Executive Branch and Congress, p. 215
Legislative Process, p. 356
Closer Look
Every law must be voted on by the House and Senate. Over the years, Congress has become increasingly open about recording the votes of members in order that voters—as well as others, such as lobbyists—know where a senator or representative stands on an issue. Until the 1970s, the House was particularly evasive by using voting techniques that made it difficult to impossible to track individual member's votes. Since reforms in that decade, votes on crucial issues usually are on the record. Even so, controversial questions may not be resolved by a clear vote. Often the language of an amendment is complicated or unclear, or parliamentary procedures are used to cloak members' views on a subject.
The ritual of voting is interesting to watch even when the question is minor, and votes on major issues can be quite dramatic. When a vote is pending, a system of bells and lights is used to summon senators and representatives from their offices to the Capitol.
House members stream into their chamber through several different entrances. They pull from their pockets white plastic cards, which they insert into one of more than forty voting boxes mounted on the backs of chairs along the aisles. Each member punches a button to indicate his or her position, and a giant electronic board behind the Speaker's desk immediately flashes green for yes and red for no next to the member's name. For those who are more cautious, yellow signals a vote of present, usually changed later to reflect support or opposition. On close votes, tension builds as the fifteen minutes allowed for the vote run out. Boisterous members sometimes shout when the tally for their side hits the number needed for victory.
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