Voting Present

During his time as a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted“Present” 129 times, a deliberate act of nonvoting that subsequently became an importantcampaign issue during the 2008 presidential elections. In this article, I examine theuse of Present votes in the Illinois state senate. I find evidence that Present votescan largely be characterized as protest votes used as a legislative tool by the minorityparty. Incorporating information from Present votes into a Bayesian polytomousitem-response model, I find that this information increases the efficiency of idealpoint estimates by approximately 35%. There is little evidence of significant moderationby Obama when Present votes are accounted for, though my results suggest that Obama’svoting record may have moderated significantly before his subsequent election to theU.S. Senate. My results also suggest that because legislative nonvoting may occur for avariety of reasons, naive inclusion of nonvoting behavior into vote choice models maylead to biased results