Voting glitch

WE CAME ON THIS quite by accident. The voting process in the state House of Representatives apparently is messed up. Here's why we say that.

Last week, the House voted to postpone action on House Bill 288, emergency contraception legislation. (We questioned the postponement in Sunday's editorial.) A press release from Linda Hahn, CEO of the Planned Parenthood Association of Bucks County, noted that among Bucks County lawmakers, only Reps. Paul Clymer, John Galloway and Tony Melio had voted to postpone action; everyone else, including Doylestown-area Rep. Marguerite Quinn, had voted against postponement. We double-checked the vote on the General Assembly's Web site and saw Quinn had been recorded as a “yes'' vote for postponement.

To clear up the discrepancy we called Quinn on Friday morning, and she told us she had, in fact, physically voted against postponement; pushed her “no button” and everything. But somewhere between the time Quinn cast her vote and the time vote-tally sheets were distributed, her vote got changed. Quinn says she didn't look at the tally sheet immediately, feeling there was no need. She only found out about the wrongly recorded vote later when her neighbor on the floor, Bucks County Rep. Katharine Watson, called her and informed her that her vote had wrongly been recorded as a “yes.” When she contacted House Speaker Dennis O'Brien, Quinn said she was told that votes are routinely recorded erroneously. Quinn said she'll now have to publicly inform the House that her vote was actually “no,” even though the “official'' and in this case wrong vote tally will stand.

There's something amiss with a voting system that records votes the wrong way even part of the time. We can't imagine why House officials don't do something about it, because they are aware of the problem. People looking on the House Web site for a particular vote can't trust what's posted there. We had to make a couple of phone calls to find out a member's true position on an issue. It's likely most folks wouldn't bother to do that, and probably even fewer would be aware of the correction.

This little bit of housekeeping should be attended to. Those who run the House need to find out what's going with the voting process and then fix it.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/318-10082007-1420026.html