There’s a green button for “aye” and a red button for “no” on Concord Assembly member Anamarie Ávila Farías’ desk.
She feels obligated to push one of those buttons for every bill that comes her way in the California Legislature – even if hitting the red one might make her an outlier among her Democratic colleagues. After all, they almost never vote against bills, particularly those authored by their fellow Democrats.
She voted “no” this year 41 times. That’s the most of any of California’s 90 Democratic lawmakers, who each voted “no” on average less than nine times in about 2,200 opportunities. That’s less than 1% of the time.
“There’s no third button,” Ávila Farías said in an interview. “I feel that people sent me to Sacramento to make hard decisions, and I have to answer to the voters, and laying off a bill is not showing up to represent my constituents.”
“Laying off” refers to a widespread practice in the Capitol: Instead of casting a “no” vote, lawmakers regularly choose not to vote at all. Not voting counts the same as “no.” It also counts the same as when a lawmaker isn’t there to cast a vote.
An analysis of the CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database, which tracks every vote in the Legislature, found that the average Democratic lawmaker missed close to 100 votes on bills this year. Republicans miss even more votes, despite, on average, casting a “no” vote 53 times more than the average Democrat. The minority party’s 30 lawmakers missed an average of nearly 400 votes this year, the analysis found.
It’s extremely difficult for the public to know if these non-votes were because a lawmaker had an excused absence or if they just dodged tough decisions. The Legislature’s public-facing bill tracking website, where Digital Democracy gets its information, records all missed votes exactly the same: “NVR,” short for “no vote recorded.”
Critics say the Legislature has made voting records opaque for a reason: It allows lawmakers to avoid accountability.
“Somebody’s voting record is the single most appropriate way for a voter to understand how they’re being represented in Sacramento, because it’s black and it’s white,” said Jon Fleischman, a longtime political strategist and conservative commentator. “When you go to look and you see that there’s ‘no vote recorded,’ you obviously don’t know what that means.”
Such criticism isn’t new. Last year, CalMatters and its partners at CBS News collaborated on an Emmy award-winning investigation on the consequences of lawmakers killing popular legislation by not voting on bills. Yet the practice shows no sign of abating. At least 22 bills failed in roll-call votes this year due to so many lawmakers not voting. They include controversial measures on criminal sentences, bear hunting, suing oil companies, streamlining housing permits, rural schools staffing and ballot initiative disclosures.
Why one Democrat doesn’t dodge votes
There seems to be little appetite in the Capitol to provide the public with a better accounting of missed votes versus absences.
The Legislature’s Democratic leaders, Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire of Santa Rosa and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas of Salinas, did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Former lawmakers and Capitol insiders tell CalMatters that lawmakers who vote “no” risk annoying colleagues who might see a public rebuke of their bill as an insult and retaliate. They say lawmakers also fear angering wealthy lobbying organizations that have come to expect lawmakers to “hold off” on the rare times Democrats aren’t voting “aye” in lock-step. Democrats who control the Legislature voted “aye” on bills this year an average of 95% of the time, according to Digital Democracy’s analysis, which excluded votes on routine resolutions.
Ávila Farías voted “aye” at a pace in line with her fellow Democrats, but instead of not voting when she didn’t like a measure, she decided early this year to vote “no.”
Ávila Farías said the only time she chose not to vote on a bill happened near the start of the session shortly after being sworn in for her first term. Someone later asked her if she didn’t vote because she was “wandering” the hallways, implying she shirked responsibility. After that, she said she decided to always cast a vote.
“I’ll make sure that I’m very consistent and that you always know where I am on these bills,” she said.
So far, she said she’s not experienced any retaliation from her colleagues. If anything, she said her “no” votes have led to productive conversations that helped her colleagues improve their bills.
Meanwhile, she said was disappointed to learn from CalMatters that she had missed 22 votes this year. She said she tried her best to be present and vote on every measure, but a few inadvertently slipped by her.
“I’ll do better the next round and make sure it’s a zero,” she said.
Two other Dems aren’t afraid to say ‘no’
Assembly member Jasmeet Bains had 36 “no” votes, the second most of any Democrat.
Bains, who’s running for her Bakersfield-area congressional district, has never been particularly shy about voting “no,” even if it irks her Democratic colleagues.
In 2023, she cast the lone Democratic “no” vote against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s bill that sought to punish oil companies for raising gas prices while earning record profits. Her vote drew immediate rebukes from Democratic leaders and Newsom’s office.
“At the end of the day,” she said, “I just hear what my community tells me and what they thank me for.”
Bains also missed 202 votes this year, causing her to have the tenth-highest rate of missed votes among Democrats. She said she usually chooses not to vote on a bill if she’s not comfortable with the current version but she believes it can be changed later to address her concerns.
“Sometimes it does, and then I end up supporting,” she said. “And sometimes it doesn’t.”
Assembly member Robert Garcia, a Democrat representing the Rancho Cucamonga area, said he decided to vote “no” while he was running for his first term last year after reading a CalMatters story on Democratic Assembly member Mike Fong of Alhambra. CalMatters reported that until then, Fong had never voted “no” in his legislative career.
“No knock on Mr. Fong,” Garcia said. “But I did feel that if you’re … going there to Sacramento, it’s to know the bills and to take a position and, you know, and not be on the sidelines.”
Garcia voted “no” 31 times this year, the third most of any Democrat. He missed 57 votes, which he said he didn’t intend to do.
Garcia said he got his schedule mixed up during the frantic final day of the legislative session, and he ended up not being present for part of the marathon push to vote on the hundreds of remaining measures pending before the deadline. Digital Democracy data shows that Garcia missed 25 votes on the final day of the session.
For his part, Fong voted “no” four times this year. He only missed six votes, the lowest rate of any rank-and-file lawmaker. Fong didn’t return an interview request for this story.
Republicans skip votes even more
Republicans continued this year to have substantially more missed votes than Democrats, due, they say, to having so little input in the legislative process. Republicans cast plenty of “no” votes though. The average Republican voted “no” 22% of the time.
Republican Assembly member Carl DeMaio of San Diego had the highest percentage of “no” votes among the GOP legislators. He voted against bills 36% of the time.
DeMaio, who missed 135 votes this year, said he’s been trying to press his Republican colleagues to vote “no” more often instead of holding off.
But DeMaio leveled his sharpest criticism about not voting on the Democrats who control the Legislature.
“It’s the chickenshit way of saying, ‘Well, I think this is a really bad bill, but I don’t want to offend my colleague by voting ‘no,’ ” he said.
Fleischman, the conservative political commentator, says Republicans chicken out plenty, too.
He noted that several Republicans declined to vote on a slavery-reparations bill because they didn’t want to appear “against descendants of slaves, even though they knew the policy was bad.”
Tom Lackey, one of the nine Republicans who did not vote on the measure when it was on the Assembly floor, didn’t deny that rationale.
Lackey, who represents the Palmdale area, said he didn’t want to appear insensitive to Black members of his community. To him, since not voting counts the same as a “no,” it was a more polite way to oppose the policy.
“The way you say ‘no,’ sometimes it matters,” Lackey said. “And sometimes a soft ‘no’ is called for.”
There’s also the question of whether it’s fair for legislators with excused absences to have their missed votes count the same as “no” votes. Some other states do it differently. Hawaii’s Legislature, for example, doesn’t count absent lawmakers when tallying votes.
Should absences count differently?
Some of the lawmakers with high numbers of missed votes had excused absences this year.
They include Republican Assembly member Kate Sanchez of Orange County, north state Republican Sen. Megan Dahle, Democratic Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes of San Bernardino, Democratic Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of San Ramon and Democratic Assembly member Stephanie Nguyen of Elk Grove. Each missed hundreds of votes due to medical reasons or other excused absences.
Bauer-Kahan and Nguyen responded to CalMatters requests for an interview; the others did not. Bauer-Kahan sent an emailed statement that said of her 299 missed votes, more than 200 were due to excused absences.
“Many, if not most, were while I was participating in critical discussions with global policy leaders about government’s role in fostering AI innovation while ensuring the safety of our communities,” Bauer-Kahan said.
Her office didn’t answer questions about whether the public should be able to more easily determine if their lawmakers missed votes because they weren’t there.
Nguyen said in an email that 75% of her 313 missed votes were due to absences, but she said she believes abstaining is a “responsible tool that reflects careful judgment” when a lawmaker doesn’t fully support a bill.
She also doesn’t feel the vote-tracking system needs fixing, saying the Legislature shouldn’t add more bureaucracy “because the system already makes clear whether a member voted yes, no, or did not vote.”
Republicans Lackey and DeMaio said they’d prefer the option of voting “present” as members of Congress do when they don’t want to take a position on a bill. At least that way, Lackey said, people would know they were at work that day.
Fleischman said it would be relatively easy for legislative leaders to change the vote tally to reflect absences on the Legislature’s website.
“You’ve got ‘NVR’ for ‘no vote recorded,’ and you should have an ‘ABS’ for ‘absent,’ ” he said.
Bains, the Kern County Democrat, said she thinks it’s worth considering such a change.
“I think that transparency would be welcomed by both sides,” she said. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.”
