Read Your Representative's Voting Record Before You Pick Up the Phone

Most calls to Congress go like this. A citizen is angry about something, dials the office, tells a young staffer that the member "needs to get the message," and hangs up feeling heard. The staffer writes down one tally mark. Somewhere in a spreadsheet, you are a hash mark in the column marked "concerned."

You can do better, and it costs you about an hour. The secret is that your representative has already told you what he or she believes, in public, in writing, with a timestamp. Every vote is recorded. Every bill a member sponsors or cosponsors carries a name. A message that begins "On such-and-such a date you voted yes on this bill, and here is my question" lands in a different pile from "I'm upset about Washington." Let me show you how to do it, step by step.

I'm keeping the steps plain, because the work is plain. The persuasion comes from the facts, not from the adjectives.

Why the record beats the opinion

A congressional office hears from citizens all day. Most of what comes in is an opinion. An opinion costs nothing to state and nothing to ignore. A message that cites the member's own recorded vote is a different object: it shows you did the reading, it cannot be dismissed as a form letter, and it forces a specific answer. The member must either defend the vote, explain it, or change course.

There is also a constitutional reason this works. The Constitution requires each house to keep a record. Article I, Section 5 says that each house "shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings," and that 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." The Founders wanted the people to be able to see how their representatives voted. That is not a courtesy. It is the mechanism of accountability the text itself builds in. When you read the record, you are using the Constitution the way it was designed.

Step 1: Find out who your members are

You have three: one House member and two senators. If you don't know who they are, start with the site's my representatives page, where you can look up your members by address. Write down all three names, their parties, and the office addresses and phone numbers for both Washington and the district. The district office matters, as I'll explain in the last step.

If you have recently moved, or if your district lines were redrawn after the last census, double-check. A good many people call a member who stopped representing them years ago.

Step 2: Read the scorecard, then keep going

Next, open the site's scorecard page and look up your members' scores. A score is a summary: someone took a set of votes, decided which side was correct, and tallied the result. That is useful as a map. It tells you where to look. But it is not the record. It is somebody's reading of the record, and every organization that produces a score chose which votes to count.

So treat the score as a starting point. Pick two or three votes that interest you, and move to the primary source in the next step. A rule of thumb for the whole exercise: a score is a summary, a vote is a fact. Build your message on the fact.

Step 3: Look up the roll-call votes

The official record lives in two places. The House Clerk publishes every House roll-call vote, and the Senate publishes every Senate roll-call vote on its own website. Congress.gov, the official legislative site maintained by the Library of Congress, links bills to their votes and lets you look up any member's page.

Here is how to read what you find:

1. Find the bill. Every bill has a number, such as H.R. followed by digits for a House bill or S. followed by digits for a Senate bill. Note the number and the congress, since numbers restart every two years.
2. Find the roll call. The bill's page on Congress.gov lists the actions taken on it, including votes. Each roll call has a number, a date, a question being voted on and the tally.
3. Find your member. The roll-call page lists every member's vote by name. The possible entries are Yea, Nay, Present and Not Voting. Note the difference between a member who voted No and one who simply did not vote.
4. Write down the date, the roll-call number and the vote. You will cite these in your message.

Take your time, because the details are where the value is.

Step 4: Tell a procedural vote from a passage vote

Here is the trap that catches many well-meaning citizens. Not every vote on a bill is a vote on the bill.

A passage vote is the final question: shall the bill pass? Yea means the member supports sending the bill forward. That is the clearest signal of a member's position.

A procedural vote is a vote on how the chamber will handle the bill. Examples include:

• The rule. In the House, most major bills are brought to the floor under a "rule" that sets the time for debate and the amendments allowed. A vote on the rule is a vote on the terms of debate, and the majority party typically votes for its own rules. A vote against the rule is often a protest about the process, not the bill.
• Motion to table. A motion to table sets a question aside, often killing it.
• Motion to recommit. In the House, the minority has traditionally used this motion to send a bill back to committee, usually with instructions to amend it.
• Cloture. In the Senate, a vote on cloture is a vote to end debate and move to a final vote. It takes 60 senators to invoke cloture on most matters. The filibuster is why, and The Filibuster After the Midterm, Why Sixty Votes Now Protect the Outnumbered explains how that rule shapes a senator's votes.
• Motion to proceed. In the Senate, a vote on whether to take up a bill at all.

Why does this matter for your message? Because members are quite capable of explaining a procedural vote. If you write "you voted against the bill" when the member actually voted against a motion to table, the staffer will correct you in a paragraph, and your credibility will go with it. Read the question on the roll-call page, and describe the vote accurately. A message that says "You voted Nay on the motion to proceed on date, roll call number" is a message that nobody can wave away.

Step 5: Check the cosponsorships and the committees

A vote is a reaction. A sponsorship is an action. The member who introduces a bill is the sponsor, and members who sign on to it are cosponsors. Each member's page on Congress.gov lists the bills sponsored and cosponsored.

Use this in two ways. First, a cosponsorship tells you what the member cares about enough to attach a name to, without anybody forcing a vote. Second, it gives you something affirmative to ask for. "You cosponsored this bill, thank you; will you urge your committee chair to schedule a hearing?" is a more useful request than "do something."

If your member introduced bills on topics you care about, read the bill's text. Bills have summaries on Congress.gov, but the text is the law. Summaries are written by staff, and the words matter.

Note the committees too

Most legislation dies or lives in committee. Each member sits on a few committees and subcommittees, and the assignments are listed on the member's official page and on the committee websites. A member on the Judiciary Committee has a say over what happens to a judicial nomination or a criminal-justice bill. A member on Appropriations has a say over spending. That tells you whom to ask about what.

The practical rule: ask each member about the things the member can actually affect. A request that fits the member's committee seat is a request the office can act on. A request that does not fit is a request that is politely acknowledged and then filed.

For a wider view of how the House runs, including the Rules Committee that decides which bills reach the floor, see Schoolhouse Rock Left Out the Rules Committee, and That Is Where Bills Move and The Numbers That Run Congress, From 218 to 60 to 290 to 38 and Back.

Step 6: Write the message, short and specific

Now you have the material. Here is a formula, and it fits on one page.

1. Open with who you are. Give your name and the town in your district. Offices give priority to constituents, and they check addresses. If you are not in the district, you are not the member's constituent.
2. Name the specific thing. Cite the bill number, the date and the roll-call number or the sponsorship.
3. State the fact. "On a date, you voted Yea on H.R. such-and-such." Do not editorialize about the vote in this sentence.
4. Give one reason, in a sentence or two. What does the vote mean for your family, your town or your work? Be concrete.
5. Make one request. Ask for one action: to explain the vote, to cosponsor a bill, to vote a certain way on an upcoming measure, to support a hearing.
6. Say thank you, and ask for a reply. Politeness is not weakness. A staffer who finds you courteous will pass your message up the chain.

Here is a labelled hypothetical to show the shape. This is an example, not a real letter. Picture a constituent writing: "I live in a town in your district. On a date last spring you voted Nay on roll call number such-and-such, a motion to proceed on a bill I care about. Could you tell me why you voted that way, and whether you will vote to bring the bill up again? I would appreciate a reply." That is a hundred words, it is polite, and it asks one question the office must answer.

A short message beats a long one, because the person reading it is reading hundreds. Keep to one subject per message. If you have three issues, send three messages.

Step 7: Choose the channel

Each channel has a purpose.

• A phone call to the Washington or district office, which you can reach through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121, is quick, and the staffer will log your topic and your position. Use it for a time-sensitive vote, and keep the call to a minute. State your name, your town, the bill number and your request.
• A letter or email is better for the detailed question, because it can cite the roll call and it leaves a record. Use the member's official contact form. Offices read those.
• The district office is where constituent services happen, and where staff members often attend local events. A visit or a call there tends to be less rushed than the Capitol office.
• A town hall is the face-to-face option, covered in Asking a Town Hall Question a Member Has to Answer on the Record.

Whichever you use, be civil. You are not trying to win an argument with a nineteen-year-old intern. You are trying to put a fact and a request in front of a decision-maker.

Step 8: Follow up, keep a file, and avoid the mistakes

Write down the date and the topic of each contact, and keep a copy. If you do not get a reply in a couple of weeks, follow up once. Then, and this matters, use what you learn. If the member explains a vote and the explanation holds up, say so. If the explanation does not match the record, you have learned something for the next election. Either way, you have moved from an impression to evidence. The same habit works for any elected official; How to Read Your District Attorney's Record Before You Vote applies it to a local race.

What to avoid:

• Do not threaten. A threat ends the conversation.
• Do not send a form letter without editing it. Offices recognize them.
• Do not guess at the record. If you are not sure what the vote was, look it up before you write.
• Do not demand that the member vote for something that is not in the member's power, such as a bill that is not on the schedule or a matter that belongs to the other chamber.
• Do not forget the other side of the aisle. A request that reaches a member of either party has a chance. A request that dismisses half the Congress as hopeless has none.

Measuring this against the Founding

The petition clause of the First Amendment protects "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Notice that it is a right to petition for a redress, not a right to be agreed with. A specific petition, grounded in the member's own record, is the form in which the right works best, because it asks for something the member can grant or refuse in public. Madison wrote in Federalist 57 that the House should be bound to the people by dependence and by frequent elections. Your part in that bargain is to know what you are holding them to.

There is a joke hidden in all this, and I'll tell it plainly. We spend a great deal of time complaining that Congress ignores us, and then we call and say nothing a member could possibly be held to. The least a citizen can do is make the staffer's life easy by being specific. The most a citizen can do is be impossible to ignore.

The case in brief

1. The Constitution requires each house to keep a journal and to record the yeas and nays on request, so a member's votes are public by design.
2. A message that cites a member's own recorded vote or cosponsorship is more persuasive than an opinion, because it shows research and demands a specific answer.
3. Use the scorecard as a map and Congress.gov and the chambers' own sites as the source, and be careful to tell a procedural vote from a passage vote.
4. Match the request to the member's committee seat, state it in one sentence, and ask for one action.
5. Be polite, be short, follow up once, and keep a file so you can judge the answer against the record.

What you can do: look up your House member on the my representatives page, pick one vote from the past year on Congress.gov, and write down the date, the roll-call number and how the member voted before you make your next call.