Sometimes you have to wonder if members of the General Assembly want to keep the public in the dark about the work they’re conducting on behalf of and for that same public.

Our stance in the past has been consistent: Virginians should be able to follow the actions of their elected leaders as easily as possible. They should know how legislators vote at all levels of the legislative process. It’s simply a matter of good government, as an informed public is essential to a healthy democracy.

But leaders of the House of Delegates, the lower chamber of the General Assembly, seems intent on making it as difficult as they can for Virginians to follow the votes of their elected officials. Sadly, it doesn’t look as though that’s about to change anytime soon.

Here’s how they do it.

In the 100-member House, the vast majority of the work is done in the chamber’s 14 standing committees, each of which has several subcommittees beneath it. When a bill is introduced, it’s assigned to the appropriate committee for evaluation and hearings, beginning at the subcommittee level.

Only a small fraction of the bills introduced make it out of subcommittees, much less the full committee, to get to the House floor for a formal vote. But it’s the subcommittee that is the least transparent of all the steps in the House.

Del. Ben Cline, a Republican who represents part of Amherst County, has tried for the past two sessions to change that. Votes of the subcommittees, strangely enough, are not recorded; they’re simply voice votes or raised hands. And those votes are not recorded.

Cline has tried to change that with legislation that would require all subcommittee and committee votes to be officially recorded. Under Cline’s proposal, every bill, resolution and budget amendment would receive a recorded vote at each level of scrutiny.

When Cline’s bill came before the House Rules Committee, chaired by Speaker Bill Howell and the chairmen of the House’s 14 standing committees, it suffered the same fate as similar legislation did in 2016. It died. On an unrecorded vote.

Supporters were in the audience en masse, prepared to speak for the bill. They were never called up, and committee members tried to blame that on Cline himself. “I guess no one stood up and said they wanted to speak,” Speaker Howell said, noting it’s the bill patron’s responsibility. One committee member even complained about the bill, claiming it would increase legislators’ workloads by half.

Now some people may see this as inside-baseball talk for politicians and the chattering class, but it matters to everyone who cares about good government. According to Transparency Virginia, an open government advocacy group, 95 percent of legislation in the 2016 session of the Assembly died without a record in the House, and 72 percent of the bills died at the subcommittee level.

But it does matter. This year, Democratic and Republican legislators introduced legislation and constitutional amendments to address matters ranging from reforming the process by which ex-felons can regain their civil rights to dialing back the level of partisanship in redistricting. On the day the bills were scheduled for consideration in subcommittee, supporters had traveled from across the commonwealth to speak up. In one move, the subcommittee chairman lumped all the bills into one package and said House leadership wanted the bills quickly dispensed with.

And on a single vote, they all died. A single, unrecorded vote.

Correction

The House of Delegates committee vote on which all of the constitutional amendments and redistricting legislation died was a recorded vote.