FOR avid States-watchers – and there is an island full of them – a move by the States Assembly and Constitution Committee to make the voting record of the House available online is a significant advance.

For short of visiting the Greffe and asking to access the register, there is currently no easy way of seeing how your district representatives have voted on key issues.

Yes, this newspaper publishes the main decisions but unless electors cut them out for future reference there is no easily researchable archive of the outcome of debates and, to that extent, less accountability than there should be.

Committee vice-chairman Mary Lowe has been a long-term campaigner to open up the workings of the States and it is perhaps revealing that putting voting online is dependent on pressure from a committee rather than as a natural extension of the Greffe making itself more user-friendly or of the Policy Council trying to make more information more readily available.

Still, progress is progress – unless ‘resources’ are cited as a reason why a list of up to 47 names voting pour or contre cannot be made available on the States own website.

The next step for Deputy Lowe, of course, is full electronic voting, whereby every vote on every decision is recorded, something she has campaigned for over the years.

To date, cost is the usual reason why it has not been introduced and why the Chamber has preferred to rely for close votes on an appel nominal, where each member is asked in turn whether he or she is in favour or against a particular proposition.

While time-consuming, its critics have in the past claimed that it enables ‘wobbling’ deputies to see which of their colleagues or department members are voting in a certain way and modify their own ballot accordingly.

And there have been members in the past who would regularly absent themselves when a recorded vote was being taken to avoid being seen in public to have gone with or against a particularly sensitive issue.

With more members and electors regarding being a States member as a full-time job, perhaps electronic voting will be introduced – if only as a form of clocking in.