Voting records of senators on bills and resolutions are to be placed in the official minutes of the senate, as well as made available from all years of the senators’ tenure at election time each year.
The secretary will be responsible for keeping voting records while in this role, as well as passing on all voting records in his or her possession to the next year’s elected secretary so that the voting records (over the entire tenure) of a senator can be made available at election time.
Records of votes to call the question, approve the agenda/minutes, and other such matters are not required to be kept.
Rationale:
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This bill seeks to focus the attention of voters on the issues at hand, and give voters an idea of the views of senators elected in previous years. As very few non-senators attend senate meetings, it provides students information they otherwise would not have known, and helps ensure that the senators elected each year are representative of students’ views, and not elected solely based on popularity.
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Providing the text of senate bills, as well as records of how each senator voted on all bills during his or her tenure, may lead to increased non-senator participation in the senate, increased dialogue between the student body at large and the senators elected from each class, and heightened awareness of the existence and purpose of the senate.
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Records are only required to be kept of votes on resolutions and bills as these are the most important actions the senate takes, and are typically more controversial and have a greater affect on LHS than do the more minor votes mentioned in paragraph three of the bill.
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While this method of recording who votes for and against which bills and resolutions may increase slightly the time it takes to count the votes, it is worth doing in order to have a more informed student and faculty body and elections that are more issue-based.