I’ve been traveling all this week and haven’t kept up with the regular blogging I try to do here. Sorry to those of you who live for the gems that show up on this blog. (Anyone? Anyone?)

Congress is out this week, so it’s a good time to not pay attention to them and spend time on whatever else it is you like to do.

But I got an interesting request today – for the number of votes on a particular bill. We show the vote percentages, of course. But I don’t have access to a vote count even in our back-end system. (I could get it by paying my database guys to make it available to me.) When I’m curious about the number of votes, I often just vote on a bill myself and see whether/how much the vote percentages change. That gives me a rough idea, anyway.

Once in a while I’m contacted by an outraged visitor who is certain that the site is a fraud because a vote changed dramatically. The vote can change from 33%-67% to 82%-18% with just eight votes in the early-going. But, no, people think I set up this whole site and maintain it at great expense in time and money so I can skew the results on the “Prevention of Shag Carpet and Wood Paneling Act of 2009.” It’s pretty funny, actually (most of the time).

We do give each bill one vote on each side when it’s introduced. Those votes are fraudulent, I guess. Slap the cuffs on, officer.

So, do you care about the number of votes on bills? The one reason I’d be reluctant to publish it is that people who are new to the site and new to public policy might think there’s nothing going on if they look at the long tail of bills that generate no interest. I like people to get a real sense of excitement here on WashingtonWatch.com (Anyone? Anyone?) But we could always suppress the vote count until it reaches a certain number to solve that.

I predict a comment-count here of approximately zero. But maybe you’ll surprise me with your passion.