There’s an article that you can read here (found via Lex)that explains how any one person can steal a statewide election if certain electronic voting machines are used.  Luckily here in Forsyth County our Board of Elections said "nyet" to these machines and the director, who wanted the machines, quit in protest.  The bad news is that she’s now working in the state (NC) elections office.

As the author of the article says the average person will probably see warnings about possible election tampering to be alarmist or far-fetched, but I personally have a few reasons to believe it.  Among them:

• We’re talking politicians here.  I’d rather be surrounded by convicted felons than these folks since I’d at least know that the convicted felons were dumb enough to get caught.  These politicians are some of the smarter crooks out there.
• I spent a year or two managing the website for a non-profit with zero visibility.  For absolutely no reason other than having a little fun someone hacked the site and posted porn…twice.  If someone’s willing to hack merely for grins and giggles don’t you think there’s more than a few hackers who would consider hacking an election to be the ultimate in cool?
• These are computers.  Anyone who’s gotten the blue screen of death needs no further proof that things can go radically wrong.  Put another way, "Microsoft."

So yeah I’d say we’re screwed.

There’s been some chatter about how little actual work the US Congress did this year.  In 1948 Harry Truman called the Congress that year the "Do-Nothing Congress" because they only met for 101 days.  Well after adjourning on October 2 this year the House of Representatives had booked only 93 legislative sessions.  The Senate calendar indicates they were in session for 125 days.

I thought it would be interesting to look at Congress’ payroll and see how this worked out in the number of dollars spent for days in legislative session.  Since their fiscal year starts Oct 1 we’ll have to include to the end of the 109th Congress’ first session (2005). Also, to be fair, let’s keep in mind that even though the Congress isn’t in session it doesn’t mean they aren’t working, but all those days not in session means that they’re free to do things like campaign, go on press-the-flesh tours, attend fundraisers and engage in activities not directly related to governance.  In essence what I’m saying is that looking at the number of legislative sessions is a good measurement for how much actual legislative work our Congress members are doing. For a year-by-year comparison since 1993 check out this article.

For those who would like to check the numbers you can find the appropriation for Congress’ 2006 budget, Public Law 109-55, 109th Congress, here (PDF).

Let’s start with the Senate. Their Official Personnel and Often Expense Account budget for FY06 was $350,000,000 or $3,500,000 per Senator.  The Senators were in session for 38 days between October 1 and December 31, 2005, and if you add that to the 125 days in 2006 you get a total of 163 days in session.  Divide $350,000,000 by 163 and you get $2,147,239 per day in session.  And that doesn’t include the salaries of the committee staff, the offices of the VP and the President Pro Tem, the offices of the majority and minority leaders, etc.  This is just for the personal staff.  Heck, the salaries for the  Appropriations Committee itself comes to $13,758,000 or $84,405 per legislative session!

On the House side the appropriation for salaries and expenses was $1,100,907,000.  From my reading this number includes all the salaries and expenses for various committees’ staffs and operational staff like the Capitol Police and the Library of Congress, so this isn’t a direct comparison to the Senate. So the overall salary and expenses on the House side divided by 435 members gives you $2,530,820 per member.  The House was in session for 32 days between October 1 and December 31, 2005.  Add that to the 93 days they were in session in 06 and you get a total of 125 days in session.  Divide the total salary and expense number and you get $8,807,256 per legislative session.

In an effort to make a more direct comparison between the personal staff of the House and Senate I searched around to find out what each House member was allocated to pay personal staff and expenses.  I found this little item that said that the "Member Representational Allowance" varied from member to member based on seniority but that it was around $1,000,000 per member.  So if you use a rough estimate of $435,000,000 for the House and divide it by 125 legislative sessions you get  $3,480,000 per session, compared to the Senate’s $2,147,239 per session.

For some real fun let’s look at the Senate and House members’ own salaries.  Rank and file members of the House and Senate get paid $165,200.  For Senators that means they made $1,013.50 per legislative session and for House members they were paid $1,321.60 per legislative session.  The House and Senate majority and minority leaders each gets paid $183,500 so the House leaders are getting paid $1,468 per legislative session and the Senat leaders are getting paid $1,125.77.  Finally, the Speaker of the House gets paid $212,100 which equates to $1,696.80 per legislative session.

So what did my Congressperson Virginia Foxx cost me and my fellow citizens here in NC’s 5th district?  I wrote about her office’s payroll a couple of weeks back so let’s use those numbers and divide by 125 sessions.  I calculated her staff’s pay for the year at about $670,000 and if you add her salary the total comes to $835,200 or $6,681.60 per legislative session.  Her office’s salary total is actually one of the lowest in the NC delegation so I guess I should consider myself lucky.

How about our NC Senate members?  In this post I calculated that the Senators’ average payroll was $2,023,399 which divided by 163 sessions works out to $12,413.49 per legislative session.  Ouch.

Some other things to keep in mind:

• Attendance at legislative sessions aren’t mandatory.  For your individual Congress member you should look at their attendance record.  They could actually have been even more do-nothing than these numbers show.
• The numbers above don’t include a lot of overhead.  The appropriation for the legislative branch is at least $3 billion so this is costing us a lot more than the numbers above indicate.

I’d say we need to look starting for a better return on our investment.