Rapid City pastor Greg Blanc, who moonlights as rookie Republican Senator from District 35, wants to proposes micromanagerial Senate Bill 108 to “require that all recorded votes of a legislator be displayed on the Legislative Research Council website.”
The Legislative Research Council already does what the title of SB 108 asks it to do. Every recorded vote of every legislator is already displayed on the LRC website. Committee and floor votes on bills are all posted on bill pages. We can also find every vote in the journals of the House and Senate and their committees.
But Senator Pastor Blanc wants a separate webpage for each legislator showing their votes on bills and resolutions, along with absences or excusals. S.P. Blanc wants that vote page added as a tab to each legislator’s LRC profile page, alongside Detail, Committees, Bills, and Hearings.
As a blogger and a member of the top percentile of users of sdlegislature.gov, I ought to like any proposal that puts more information on the LRC website. But I’m not sure SB 108 produces much more useful information, and I’m not sure the time and effort it would demand of LRC staff to produce that paltry information.
As I said, the information SB 108 would provide is already available in multiple places. SB 108 only collates that information differently. What would this different collation tell us?
The answer, I’m afraid, is… not much.
SB 108 calls for “a record of each vote made by the legislator on each bill and resolution voted on in that legislator’s chamber and in each committee to which the legislator is appointed”. That language would produce a list like this for Senator Blanc so far this Session:
| Bill | Vote | Motion | Chamber/ Committee | Date |
| HB 1033 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/28 |
| HB 1044 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/28 |
| HB 1055 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate Judiciary | 1/29 |
| HCR 6002 | Yea | Concur | Senate | 1/26 |
| HCR 6003 | Yea | Concur | Senate | 1/26 |
| HCR 6004 | Yea | Concur | Senate | 1/28 |
| HCR 6005 | Yea | Concur | Senate | 1/26 |
| SB 2 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate Judiciary | 1/22 |
| SB 2 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 4 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 5 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/20 |
| SB 7 | Yea | Defer to 41st Day | Senate Taxation | 1/21 |
| SB 8 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/20 |
| SB 9 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 10 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 11 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/20 |
| SB 12 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 14 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/27 |
| SB 17 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 18 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 19 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 21 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/29 |
| SB 22 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 23 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/20 |
| SB 24 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 25 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 25 | Yea | Reconsidered | Senate | 1/26 |
| SB 25 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/26 |
| SB 26 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 27 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 30 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/28 |
| SB 31 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/28 |
| SB 34 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 36 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/29 |
| SB 38 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 39 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 40 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/16 |
| SB 41 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate Judiciary | 1/15 |
| SB 41 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/16 |
| SB 42 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate Judiciary | 1/15 |
| SB 42 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/16 |
| SB 43 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate Judiciary | 1/15 |
| SB 43 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/16 |
| SB 44 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate Judiciary | 1/20 |
| SB 44 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 45 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate Judiciary | 1/20 |
| SB 45 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 46 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 47 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 48 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 49 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate Judiciary | 1/20 |
| SB 49 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 50 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 51 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 52 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 53 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 54 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 56 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/20 |
| SB 57 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/21 |
| SB 58 | Yea | Defer to 41st Day | Senate Taxation | 1/21 |
| SB 61 | Yea | Placed on Calendar Purusant to JR 6F-6 | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 62 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 63 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 64 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/20 |
| SB 65 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/22 |
| SB 71 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 81 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate Judiciary | 1/27 |
| SB 81 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/28 |
| SB 82 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate Judiciary | 1/27 |
| SB 82 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/28 |
| SB 84 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/23 |
| SB 85 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/26 |
| SB 90 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/29 |
| SB 93 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/28 |
| SB 97 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate Taxation | 1/28 |
| SB 99 | Nay | Defer to 41st Day | Senate Taxation | 1/28 |
| SB 101 | Yea | Do Pass Amended | Senate | 1/28 |
| SB 103 | Nay | Defer to 41st Day | Senate Judiciary | 1/29 |
| SCR 601 | Yea | Adopt | Senate | 1/15 |
| SCR 602 | Yea | Adopt | Senate | 1/26 |
| SCR 603 | Yea | Adopt | Senate | 1/26 |
| SCR 604 | Yea | Adopt as Amended | Senate | 1/27 |
| SCR 605 | Yea | Adopt | Senate | 1/28 |
| SJR 501 | Nay | Do Pass | Senate | 1/26 |
| SJR 502 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/26 |
| SJR 503 | Yea | Do Pass | Senate | 1/26 |
| SR 701 | Yea | Amend | Senate | 1/15 |
| SR 701 | Yea | Adopt as Amended | Senate | 1/15 |
It took me 50 minutes to compile this table manually from the Bill Status Report webpage. The table covers ten days of Legislative activity, so arguably it would take an average of five minutes to update this table after each Legislative day… but things get faster and furiouser in Pierre as the Session steams along, so days like Crossover Day (Tuesday, February 24!) when there are a lot more votes might require more time to update Senator Blanc’s roll call.
But that’s five minutes of work a day just to update an SB 108 page for one legislator. Multiply by 105 legislators, and you get 525 minutes—that’s 8 hours and 45 minutes. Conceivably, SB 108 would require someone in the LRC to spend an entire workday plus lunch recompiling, checking, and republishing data that already exists elsewhere on sdlegislature.gov. And that does not include the time it would to add hyperlinks to the bills, roll call votes, and minutes or journals.
Of course, LRC may have a really nice database storing all these votes. Creating and updating 105 legislator vote compilation webpages may require no additional daily manual labor. LRC staff may simply need to create one additional SQL script at the start of Session that would select all bills, votes, motions, chambers, and dates by legislator (and getting to write and run that script and generally administer the LRC database would be one of the best ten jobs in South Dakota!). Then LRC punches in the votes as they already do to create the Session Vote pages, press a button, and pow! Blanc’s and Karr’s and Larson’s and everyone else’s votes are neatly published under tabs on their legislator profiles.
Manually or by SQL magic, what do we get for our SB 108 effort? What do the 88 entries on Blanc’s table above tell you about the District 35 Senator’s performance during the first quarter of the 2026 Session? He hasn’t missed any votes, so yay, Pastor Greg, for not getting sick or stuck in a ditch. But if all SB 108 seeks is an attendance record, LRC could present that information much more concisely and usefully in a single table for all legislators, showing the number of dates absent and the number of votes missed, plus averages to allow easy comparisons.
And do we really need a law to get legislator attendance records, or could we just ask the Executive Board to send LRC Director John McCullough a note requesting an attendance report?
Our SB 108 table shows Senator Blanc has voted yea 86% of the time… but a couple of those yeas were on motions to kill bills in committee (defer to the 41st day), and another yea was just to reconsider a bill, which by itself is not a vote for or against a bill. Sometimes a yea is not really a yea.
And yeas and nays don’t matter outside of their context.Yea or Nay, is Senator Blanc just voting along with his party leaders all the time? Does he ever vote with the Democrats? Does he consistently vote for property rights but against voter rights? Is he voting to decrease or increase taxes? How often does he vote to protect initiative and referendum from Legislative sabotage? Such questions get to what really matters about voting records, and the SB 108 tables won’t answer such questions. We’ll still have to click on the bills and roll calls (hyperlinks—crucial!) to get the context we need to make sense of the voting record. We can make that same effort now, with LRC’s existing webpages, without mandating more work from the LRC.
Senate Bill 108 may inform some trivial pursuits (and I do love Legislative trivia!), but creating separate Session-spanning vote lists for each legislator would fill 105 new LRC webpages with lengthy tables that wouldn’t make it any easier to really understand each legislator’s politics and performance.
p.s.: Hey, Pastor Greg! If you really want to help the public deeply analyze how you and your colleagues vote, just ask LRC to grant public read-only access to a copy of their database of bills, legislators, and votes. Oh, the queries I could run!