Republican congressional candidate Steve Stivers signed his name to a campaign advertisement this week, declaring of his opponent in Ohio’s 15th District that “Mary Jo Kilroy can’t hide from her 98.4% voting record with Nancy Pelosi.”
I’ll come right to the point. This claim by Steve Stivers is a lie.
A review of roll call data for the 111th Congress of 2009-2010 (the only term of Congress Mary Jo Kilroy has had in office) shows that this claim cannot be true. The current set of roll call votes for Rep. Kilroy’s term in office to date (database | codebook) flatly contradicts Steve Stivers’ claims.
The roll call record actually shows that Mary Jo Kilroy can’t possibly have voted with Nancy Pelosi 98.4% of the time, because Nancy Pelosi has only cast 88 out of 1,511 possible votes. This is because in her role as Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi does not actually cast votes unless a bill has a particularly high profile or the vote tally is especially close. Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, on the other hand, has cast 1,482 out of 1,511 votes, setting one of the best attendance records for the 111th Congress. Mathematically speaking, Mary Jo Kilroy can’t possibly have voted with Nancy Pelosi any more than 5.9% (88/1482) of the time.
In his desire to capture Ohio’s 15th District congressional seat, does Steve Stivers not care about getting caught in a lie? Or is his opinion of the 15th District so low that he thinks no one will bother to check?