City Council’s voting methods are “complete garbage” when it comes to transparency, said David Marburger, a longtime First Amendment attorney and retired partner of the Baker Hostetler law firm.
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Venture down to City Hall for one of Cleveland City Council’s Monday night meetings, and you’ll find a spectacle that is unique among local governments -- council members casting dozens of votes, seemingly without uttering a single word.
In the best-case scenario, it means Cleveland residents attending the meeting in person – or watching along on TV20 or online – would have no way to discern, in real time, how their elected representatives had voted on issues that matter. The charter, in a provision that dates back to 1931, states the voting method Council must use: “The vote upon the passage of all ordinances…shall be taken by ‘yeas’ and ‘nays’ and entered upon the Journal.”Not only does the charter require all “no” votes to be spoken aloud, he said, it also requires that all “yes” votes be spoken aloud – something that rarely happens during the normal course of council meetings.
Two parliamentarians with the Ohio Association of Parliamentarians – experts on Robert’s Rules of Order – reached different conclusions when asked byOne found Cleveland’s method to be most similar to a roll-call vote, which the rules of order describe as “very useful” for representative bodies, “especially where the proceedings are published, as it enables the people to know how their representatives voted on important measures.
The court in 2019 ruled against the village of Bratenahl, regarding the village council’s 2015 election of its president pro tempore through the use of “secret ballots,” in which members wrote their preferred candidate on slips of paper and gave them to the clerk, who announced the final tally. That method left the viewing public unable to determine who voted which way.
Each echoed what Griffin and current staff say: The method allows council to quickly dispense with a large volume of legislation, including lots of routine items, such as zoning changes, that rarely elicit pushback.
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