The table below shows the overall attendance record of each member of the General Assembly from 2003 to 2012. The database includes legislators who are no longer in the Assembly, as well as legislators who are deceased. Sort by clicking on column headings. You can limit the list by town, year, chamber and whether the legislator is a current member of the General Assembly. Click on a legislator's name to see details of his or her attendance during the 10-year period.
The Providence Journal gathered the attendance information from the roll call votes published in the House Journals and Senate Journals posted on the General Assembly website.
A computer program extracted the list of legislators present and absent from each of these publications and stored the information in a database. The program scanned 1,270 documents -- 603 Senate Journals and 667 House Journals -- published from 2003 to 2012.
It is possible that a legislator who came late to a session and missed the roll call vote could have been marked absent. We found 17 instances in which a legislator's attendance record for a particular day was subsequently corrected in the House and Senate Journals. We incorporated those corrections in our data.
We also made corrections to the data when it contained an obvious error or conflicting information. For example, Sen. Bethany Moura was not listed as either present or absent on Jan. 31, 2012. However, she is recorded as voting to approve the day's consent calendar, so we considered her present that day.
Finally, in a few cases, the House and Senate recorded multi-day sessions in a single Journal. For example, the House Journal for June 30, 2011 also includes votes and other actions House members took on Oct. 18 and Nov. 17. In those cases, which typically occurred at the end of a session, the data reflects attendance the first day only.
Sometimes, but not always, the journals give the reason for a legislator's absence.