City Council Roll Call Votes 2016-2017

The dataset contains vote results for all City Council agenda items in which a roll call vote was taken, starting in January of 2016 and ending in December of 2017.

The Cambridge City Council uses two different voting methods: voice votes and roll call votes. During a voice vote, all those in favor of a motion verbally vote “yes” simultaneously, and then all those opposed vote “no” simultaneously. During a roll call vote, each Councilor votes “yes” or “no” in turn. Voice votes are more common and are not recorded in this dataset. The Council tends to rely on roll call votes for City Manager’s agenda items related to fiscal and budgetary topics (e.g., how much money to allocate to a department or program). Please read the limitations section of this metadata form to avoid misinterpretations of the data.

To learn more about Council meeting operations, please refer to the Rules of the City Council: http://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/citycouncil/20162017rulesofthecitycouncil.ashx

To learn more about the parliamentary voting procedures generally, please refer to Robert’s Rules of Order:

http://www.rulesonline.com/rror-08.htm

Querying over HTTP

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

curl https://data.splitgraph.com/sql/query/ddn \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d@-<<EOF
{"sql": "
    SELECT *
    FROM \"cambridgema-gov/city-council-roll-call-votes-20162017-43xr-6qqz\".\"city_council_roll_call_votes_20162017\"
    LIMIT 100 
"}
EOF

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.