Daily Briefs

Report: Michigan lawmakers missed five times more votes than last year


Michigan’s 38 senators and 110 representatives missed 3,791 roll call votes in 2020, according to the Missed Votes Report. The information was compiled by Jack McHugh, editor of MichiganVotes.org, a project of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

 Three senators and three representatives each missed 50 or more votes in 2020. But 12 senators and 60 representatives missed no votes this year.

The 3,791 missed votes in 2020 is understandably up from recent years, as a number of lawmakers either spent time in quarantine or contracted the COVID-19 virus during the ongoing worldwide pandemic. Michigan lawmakers missed just 768 roll call votes in 2019.

Excluding purely procedural votes, the Senate held 1,002 roll call votes in 2020 and the House 757, for a total of 1,759 roll call votes by the entire Legislature. In 2019, there were 1,614 roll call votes taken by both legislative bodies.

The number of missed votes has fallen dramatically since 2001-02, the first legislative session covered by MichiganVotes.org. Over that two-year period, individual Michigan lawmakers failed to cast a roll call vote 21,162 times.

Typically missed votes occur when family, health or personal issues require a lawmaker’s absence for an entire day or longer.

Missed votes tallies are just a small piece of the information MichiganVotes.org provides the public. The searchable database has every bill and all the votes for every Michigan state legislator. It contains plain-English descriptions of more than 38,000 bills introduced since 2001 and more than 35,000 record roll call votes.

View the complete Missed Votes Report at www.michiganvotes.org/MissedVotes.aspx

Seminar looks at ‘Using Adobe to Streamline Your Practice,’ Jan. 19
 

The Oakland County Bar Association will present “Using Adobe to Streamline Your Practice” as an online Zoom program on Tuesday, January 19, from noon to 1:30 p.m.

Adobe Certified Expert JoAnn Hathaway, practice management advisor for the State Bar of Michigan, will present an overview of Adobe Acrobat Pro before focusing on the software’s most popular features. Attendees will learn how to create electronic signatures and stamps, password protect documents so they can’t be altered, bookmarking, redaction and text recognition.

Credit has been approved with the Oakland County Bar Association for 1.5 Criminal credits.

Cost is $12 for OCBA members pre-registration and $25 for non-members pre-registration. MIDC court appointed attorneys can attend for free. The Zoom link to this seminar will be provided in a confirmation email upon registration. To register for this program, visit www.ocba.org and click on “events.”



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Subscribe to the Legal News!
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Full access to public notices, articles, columns, archives, statistics, calendar and more
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One-County $80/year
Three-County & Full Pass also available