Beacon Hill Roll Call
Greenfield Recorder
Monday, December 14, 2015
(Published in print: Monday, December 14, 2015)
By BOB KATZEN
THE HOUSE AND SENATE. There were no roll call votes in the House or Senate last week. This week, Beacon Hill Roll Call reports local representatives’ roll call attendance records for the 2015 session.
The House has held 179 roll call votes. Beacon Hill Roll Call tabulates the number of roll calls on which each representative was present and voting and then calculates that number as a percentage of the total roll call votes held. That percentage is the number referred to as the roll call attendance record.
Several quorum roll calls, used to gather a majority of members onto the House floor to conduct business, are also included in the 224 roll calls. On quorum roll calls, members simply vote “present” in order to indicate their presence in the chamber. When a representative does not indicate his or her presence on a quorum roll call, we count that as a roll call absence just like any other roll call absence.
Only 78 (49.3 percent) of the House’s 158 members have 100 percent roll call attendance records.
The representative who missed the most roll calls is Rep. Harold Naughton (D-Clinton), who missed 131 (26.8 percent attendance) because of his military service.
Also included in the top five worst records are Reps. Gail Cariddi, D-North Adams, who missed 109 (39.1 percent attendance); Gerald Parisella, D-Beverly, and Louis Kafka, D-Sharon, who missed 100 (44.1 percent attendance); and Evandro Carvalho, D-Dorchester, who missed 54 roll calls (69.8 percent).
Parisella missed many votes because of his military service, Cariddi and Kafka both had medical issues and Carvalho’s wife gave birth to their first child.
REPRESENTATIVE’S 2015 ROLL CALL ATTENDANCE RECORDS
The percentage listed next to the representative’s name is the percentage of roll call votes for which he or she was present and voting. The number in parentheses represents the number of roll calls that the he or she missed.
Rep. Stephen Kulik
99.4 percent (1)
Rep. Paul Mark
100 percent (0)
Rep. Susannah Whipps Lee
100 percent (0)