"How Do You Decide How to Vote?"

The following is from an article I submitted to the Spectrum newspaper in March of 2011. One of the questions I’m often asked by constituents and in particular school children, is how I decide which bills to vote for and which bills to vote against. It can be a somewhat complicated question to answer. Nearly 1,000 bills are filed for consideration each session. Obviously this number represents a lot of issues covering a wide variety of topics that affect many, many people. The ancient Greeks had a system of democracy where every male citizen had the opportunity to cast votes for himself in the assembly. Our system is a set up to be a representative republic where we select one person to speak and vote on behalf of a set number of people. This system has its challenges. Whereas an ancient Greek male citizen had only his own views to consider when voting, your legislators must weigh the views of ten of thousands when casting ballots. Due to the large number of bills and the complexity of some of the issues, legislators employ a wide range of strategies when deciding how to vote. One that I and my southern Utah colleagues employ is to send out a survey to constituents asking questions about the hot issues expected to come before the Legislature. We forecast what we think will be the most pressing issues. For instance in our survey this year, we asked for feedback on budgets items and possible budget cuts, liquor licenses, and immigration reform just to name a few items. Obviously we received a wide variety of responses, but the surveys show how the majority of our constituents feel on a particular issue and can guide our vote on specific bills. Another tool we use when deciding how to vote is our campaign platform and issues that might have been debated during the course of the campaign. While campaigning, we talk about our views and the issues we will and will not support if elected. A winning candidate can reasonably assume that he or she won because the majority of the voters agreed with his or her views on public policy and that platform can then serve as a measuring stick on how to vote. During the session, we do our best to communicate with our constituents and let them know what issues are coming up that will affect our communities. We get lots of emails and phone calls from people that want us to vote for or against a certain issue and those contacts, particularly from our own constituents, are very persuasive. Sometimes, however, an issue will come up where the constituency is evenly divided or the issue hits so quickly that there isn’t time for feedback. Sometimes the facts change with an amendment to a bill or issues come up that make it reasonable to vote differently than we might otherwise have done. In those cases, legislators have to rely on their instincts for what is the best policy call. We take very seriously our charge to represent you and reflect the values and beliefs of our communities. Don’t be afraid to reach out and let your legislators know how you feel about the issues of the day. We can’t represent you well if we don’t know your views.