It's true that H Res 78 provides for otherwise nonvoting members of the House to vote in the Committee of the Whole, and not in the House itself.

But roll call votes on amendments generally take place in the CoW.

My point was that allowing nonvoting members to vote in the CoW without changing the Clerk's roll call pages to reflect this - ie, that some votes included in the lists and in the final tallies, are not votes of Representatives - made the lives of those who analyze this data that little bit more difficult.

No doubt there is some value in analyzing the CoW votes of nonvoting members - but separately!

To start with, you need to have R installed (download from here) with the pscl package installed.

It worked fine for me under XP, and almost fine on my new machine cursed with Vista - Cliff Notes: you need to have your working directory somewhere other than in the R folder in Program Files. (That's my workaround, at least!)

Let's suppose you want to spreadsheet the votes given in the current House (the 110th) on votes #590-596.

You go to this page for a regularly updated file, H110.ord. This is in the format of rollcall info in earlier Congresses available at the Voteview site; unfortunately, the normal read function in R (read.table) balks at reading the ORD version. (Earlier years offer the info as a Stata file, which R can read with the foreign package.

Hence the need for the pscl package. This reads the ORD file as part of a more complicated model that I've yet to work, and which we don't need, thank God!

So - H110.ord is in your working directory.

You then need to subset the rollcalls you're interested in; and then export the subset as a CSV file.

That's fine up to a point; but the list of reps' names, parties and districts are all melded into one field.

R comes to the rescue again; you paste the names into Notepad and save the file; you then read that file into R, and then straight away export the file as a CSV.

Now, imported into a spreadsheet, we have names, parties and districts each in their own columns. Remove the superfluous brackets - and Bob's your uncle!

R is command-line, and therefore utterly unforgiving. The code is this (each line a separate instruction actioned by the Enter key):

library(pscl)
house <- readKH("H110.ord")
attach(house)
rc <- votes[ ,c(590:596)]
write.csv(rc, "590-596test.csv")
names <- read.table("590-596names.txt")
write.csv(names, "590-596names.csv")

After that, you can close R - no need to save the workspace.

If it doesn't work, I'd be delighted if you'd let me know. Really.