The Case of the Missing State House Rep
- greenvillepolitics
- May 16, 2016
- 2 min read
A few weeks back Greenville attorney Jason Elliott made headlines in The Greenville News for pointing out that through the end of March incumbent State House Rep. Wendy Nanney had missed almost 50 percent of the votes this term. Nanney fired back that she was out for illness.
Elliott, of course, is running against Nanney.
However, we wondered how Nanney’s missed time compared to other members of the Greenville Delegation and went to the SC Statehouse website to have a look. We basically pulled the online available date for the past three sessions for every State House member who calls Greenville County Home.
Some notes. A couple of people have said Nanney should be given leeway because she had “excused absences.” To clarify, if a rep says she or he is leaving then that counts as an excused absence. There is no such thing as an unexecused absence on the rolls. Just no votes. Also, when in the following graphs, when we refer to absences, it means absent votes.
Basically, here is what we found:
Nanney has more absences on votes than any other member of the delegation with 729.
She has led the delegation every term (202 in 2011-12, 133 in 2013-14, and 394 this term).
She has been absent on average 16 percent of the time with many of those coming when she leaves early.
The representative with the least amount of missed absences is Phyllis Henderson, who has missed just 49 votes in the three terms. Dwight Loftis is right behind her with just 58.
Mike Burns has missed 17 votes because of absences over the past two terms. He was not serving the term before.
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