How to Track a Vote in the House of Representatives

I know this is quite a convoluted process, which is why it has to be explained in the first place.

Note that this information is subject to change, the website look an navigation can and will likely change. The terminology could change (not that they would make it more difficult to find information, right?).

In the past I have seen House votes listed in a meaningful way, like the Senate's votes (which I will cover in a later post), by state is the most useful as people might not know the name of their representative or their name could be similar to another representative.

Here goes:

To get the proper info "from the horse's mouth" so to speak, start at

http://www.house.gov

Along the left side is a menu list. Under the "Resources" find "Clerk of the House."

Click on that and it takes you to http://clerk.house.gov .

On the navigation bar across the top of this page:

About the Clerk's Office
Member Information
Committee Information
Legislative Activities
Art & History
Public Disclosure
House Library

Hover over Legislative Activities, and the frame underneath changes accordingly.

Under Legislative Activities should be:

House Floor Proceedings
Congressional Schedule
Roll Call Votes
House Documents

Click on Roll Call Votes.

That should take you to a page called "Legislation & Votes."

On the right side of the split layout is "Roll Call Votes." Under this, click the current Congress which right now is

111th Congress, 1st Session (2009)

That will take you to an index, currently http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/index.asp with the most recent votes up to 99 or 100 per page.

The table contains the following items:
Roll Call Vote Number
Date
Issue (e.g. resolution name and number)
Result (P = Passed, F = Failed, A = Agreed-to)
Title/Description

These are labeled on the table.

For results prior to the most recent items, there are links at the bottom for each grouping, e.g. 1-99, 100-199 (to date it is only up to 192). Click on the link and you get a table of those entries.

Then to navigate, use Back because those pages do not have links back or to other pages.

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Now, for example we want to look at the vote on House Resolution 1 (first resolution for the 111th Congress).

Click on Roll Calls 1 Thru 99 [sic]

Now scroll down to at least Roll 70 which was 13-Feb and you will see H R 1 underlined as a link. Note that the vote # is also a link to the tally (which is currently a table of names, first and last separate and state listed in parentheses with last name, i.e. a mess).

Click on H R 1 and you get the THOMAS Library of Congress listing with a descriptive title and links to all kinds of good information about the resolution.

Clicking on "Major Congressional Actions" will take you to a timeline of actions in Congress.

For this particular item, you can see the House and Senate vote totals for each time it was brought to a vote. If you click on Roll no. ### you will get the jumbled table mentioned from the Roll # link above.

The Senate vote tallies are also listed along with a link to their vote (Record Vote Number: ### which can also be found starting from the senate homepage). Note how these tallies are actually useful in multiple ways.

The final Txt or PDF is currently not available, but if you go back to the H R 1 info page you can click on Text of Legislation which brings you to an index of all forms and the last is the most recent (though no dates appear on the index). For this one you can see #8 is listed as passed by both House and Senate).

The link takes you to yet another outline of links for the text, but there is also a Printer Friendly Display link which is more of a document form but I wonder if it is the entire text.

Warning: looking through the index table can be nauseating, especially looking at some of the items time is wasted on when they don't bother to read or even give time to read $X trillion spending bills before passing them.