Democrats Skipped More Votes than Republicans in Michigan Government 2010- the Ball Doesn't Lie

2010 has come and gone, and thanks to a great website like Michigan Votes, citizens of Michigan can now look at and analyze data on their legislators. One interesting statistic that I'm going to look at today is the number of votes that Michigan Congressmen missed the past year. Now, it is understandable to me to miss a few votes- sometimes your kids birthday is on the same day as a vote or sometimes their is a family emergency or sometimes there is an important debate during the campaign season, so I'm not one of those people who demand 100% voting rates out of their legislators.

But on the other hand, missing 20 or more votes out of 600 is kind of a high margin and one has to begin to ask questions. Perhaps there are explanations for these (I haven't researched every Congressman and interviewed them to find on their side of the story), but for most of them, the reason why they have missed so many votes in Michigan Congress over the past year is that they are not good Congressmen. They are doing a poor job of serving their constituents and doing a poor job of representing them in Michigan Congress and probably should be re-elected. So with that, let's take a look at the top ten Michigan Representatives and Michigan Senators who missed the most votes last year (2010). The following shows their name, their party, and the number of missed votes they had out of 672.

First let's look at the Michigan State Senators. The Top 10 'MIA' Senators for 2010 were:
Sen. Hansen Clarke, Democrat, 156 missed votes
Sen. Valde Garcia, Republican, 94 missed votes
Sen. Bruce Patterson, Republican, 87
Sen. Alan Sanborn, (R), 77
Sen. Samuel B. Thomas, III (D) 70
Sen. Martha G. Scott (D) 53
Sen. Wayne Kuipers (R) 44
Sen. Michael Switalski (D) 39
Sen. Liz Brater (D) 38
Sen. Glenn Anderson (D) 37
In 2010, there were 22 Republicans and 16 Democrats, so all things being equal, there should be more GOP members in the top 10 (GOP made up 58% of Senate, should have 5.7 of top 10) . But instead, looking at the top 10 here what jumps out to me is that 6 of them were Democrats and 4 of them were Republicans. That means that Democrats outpeformed the average by a considerable bit.

Is this some sort of larger trend- that in Michigan politics, it is the Democrats who miss more votes than the Republicans, who care less about representing in a basic way their constituents, who take a paycheck and yet don't even bother showing up to vote? Let's test that theory by looking at the top ten most votes missed results of the Michigan House of Representatives. Out of 633 votes:
Rep. Bettie Scott (D) 249
Rep. Kate Ebli (D) 194
Rep. LaMar Lemmons, Jr. (D) 159
Rep. Judy Nerat (D) 140
Rep. Doug Bennett (D) 131
Rep. John Espinoza (D) 131
Rep. Fred Miller (D) 129
Rep. George Cushingberry (D) 125
Rep. Jon Switalski (D) 119
Rep. Shanelle Jackson (D) 103
In the Michigan House of Representatives in 2010 there were 65 Democrats and 42 Republicans. All things being equal, you should expect there to be 6 Democrats and 4 GOPers in the top 10 (60% of 10). But what did we discover? All 10 of the top 10 are Democrats! In fact 19 out of the top 25 missed voters in the Michigan House were Democrats- that is a considerable higher proportion than expected!

I'm not scientist, but I did notice something- Democrats missing voted in the Michigan Senate at a higher proportion than it should be- and came up with a theory- that Democrats serving in the Michigan House have some characteristics that cause them to not showing up to vote (they're lazy, they don't care about their constituents, they have a sense of entitlement, they are too busy meeting with special interests, they have a disrespect for democracy, whatever)- and then I tested that theory using more data- the voting rates in the House of Representatives- and found that my theory was considerably justified.

To me, that proves a law- that Democrats are more likely to skip voting for whatever reason, whereas you can take it to the bank that Republicans will show up and cast ballots as they were elected and are paid to do. I'm sure though that liberals and Democrats will comment below though doing what they usually do best- coming up with excuses.