One of the advantages of having so much legislative data stored in the Richmond Sunlight database is that I can perform complex queries to get interesting information about the performance of legislators. Having recently been curious about the prevalence of vote-missing, I ran some queries to determine who has missed the most floor votes in the General Assembly. Please note that this is based only on votes held between January 23 and February 24; full data about voting behavior simply wasn’t provided by the General Assembly’s website prior to that period.
| Delegate | Party | Missed |
| Joe Johnson | D | 58% |
| Todd Gilbert | R | 27% |
| Tim Hugo | R | 18% |
| Ken Melvin | D | 15% |
| Jim Shuler | D | 14% |
| Clay Athey | R | 12% |
| Lionell Spruill | D | 10% |
| Glenn Oder | R | 9% |
| Dwight Jones | D | 7% |
| Bob Marshall | R | 7% |
Delegate Johnson tops the list because he has been undergoing treatment for liver cancer, which is going very well. I have to admit some concern about the validity of some of those higher numbers (like Del. Gilbert’s 27%), but an inspection of the data from the General Assembly’s website doesn’t reveal any technical problems. (Adam Sharp points out that Del. Gilbert underwent back surgery during session.) Five delegates missed just one vote apiece, or 0.07% of all floor votes: Kirk Cox, David Poisson, Bill Barlow, Beverly Sherwood, and John Cosgrove.
| Senator | Party | Missed |
| Charles Hawkins | R | 20% |
| Mamie Locke | D | 7% |
| Ken Stolle | R | 6% |
| John Chichester | R | 6% |
| Mary Margaret Whipple | D | 5% |
| Ryan McDougle | R | 5% |
| Stephen Martin | R | 4% |
| Benny Lambert | D | 4% |
| Chuck Colgan | D | 4% |
| Harry Blevins | R | 4% |
Two senators missed just one vote, or 0.05% of all floor votes: Mark Herring and Frank Ruff.
Del. Gilbert is my delegate, and he had back surgery during session – that’s why his absence % is so high.
Del. Athey, though, represents a neighboring district … and he has no such excuse.
Ah, that’s good to know. I had googled about, trying to find what was almost certainly a personal problem of some sort, but didn’t have any luck. I hope he’s recovered as nicely as Del. Johnson has.
There are a lot of reasons that nearly all of us missed a few of the thousands of floor votes over the past two months. You’ve noted Joe Johnson’s and Todd Gilbert’s medical absences (both of them are doing very well); there are deaths and other family emergencies that take members away from Richmond; and, even though we do everything we can to clear our calendars for the session, there are times that “citizen-legislators” simply have to be away due to business or professional obligations.
Then there’s the kidney stamina issue. I attended every session, but according to Waldo’s research I missed three floor votes. No surprise: on some days we had a series of 100 or more bills, with no break in between. Sometimes debate on one of those bills would take less than a minute; sometimes it went on longer. You could never gauge whether you had enough time to make it to the bathroom just off the floor (which is about 50 yards from my desk) and back again.
Del. Hugo’s wife had a baby during session, and he missed a couple of days to be with them.
I don’t see Watkins Abbitt’s missed vote on the abortion bill. Wasn’t it during this period of time? Or did you only search for D’s and R’s?
Here’s a Daily News-Record article about Delegate Gilbert’s time away from session, with some interesting trivia from House Clerk Bruce Jamerson.
Watkins Abbitt isn’t listed because he missed just 1.97% of all votes (39 in total), so he didn’t even come close to cracking that top 10 list.