States Assembly voting records (FOI)States Assembly voting records (FOI)
Produced by the Freedom of Information officeAuthored by Government of Jersey on behalf of the States Greffe and published on
08 March 2016.Prepared internally, no external costs.
Request
Although the results of all States votes are available online, it is impractical to analyse voting behaviour in the States chamber because of the way the information is presented, that is, each vote has it's own webpage which simply shows a list in text form.
Given that voting in the States chamber is electronic, and the States Assembly website shows the information in list and piechart form on each voting page, it follows that the data must be held in electronic form by the States somewhere other than on those webpages.
That's the data I would like.
Unless the data is already stored and can be supplied in an alternative format, I would like it on a spreadsheet, Excel preferably, with States' members names down the left of the table and the proposition number and date of the vote along the top, with the member's vote in the corresponding cell. I would like this information for at least this political term (ie, since October 2014) but if practical, as far back as the introduction of ministerial government in 2005.
Response
Electronic files of States votes are available from 2005, each vote being saved in a separate electronic file in Excel, Word or Notepad format.
There are in excess of 3,000 files and we are therefore not able to comply with the request to supply the information in a specified format due to the cost constraints outlined in Article 16(1) of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 and the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014.
The name of each file, however, does reflect the details of the voting subject and / or the applicable project number.
Within the files, each States member is listed with their vote of either pour or contre beside their name.
If there is no data against the States member’s name, this signifies that the member did not take part in that particular electronic vote.
The files could not be sent via email due to their volume and size but were copied to a USB drive and made available for the requester from the States Assembly Information Centre on the ground floor of Morier House.
This response has been issued on behalf of the States Greffe. The States Greffe is responsible for the information held by (and on behalf of) both itself and the States Assembly. Neither the States Assembly nor the States Greffe form part of the Government of Jersey and the Government was not involved either in the examination and retrieval of any information required for this response, nor in the drafting of the response itself.
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