Bass’s campaign says Nithya Raman missed 3,000 council votes. The real number is 2,966, and an estimated 519 trace to her AQMD board seat

Karen Bass’s campaign told voters at Wednesday’s mayoral debate that Nithya Raman had missed nearly 3,000 council votes since taking office, roughly 14 percent of them. Every roll call the City Council has taken since 2003 is a public file, so both halves of that are checkable, and both hold up.

Raman has been recorded absent on 2,966 roll calls, out of the 21,344 her seat was eligible to vote on between December 15, 2020 and August 12, 2026. That works out to 13.90 percent. We pulled the figure three ways out of the City Clerk’s vote system and got the same answer each time.

Raman’s team answered with an explanation rather than a denial: her seat representing Los Angeles on the South Coast Air Quality Management District board, which meets on a fixed schedule that the council’s roll can be checked against.

What 2,966 is out of

Los Angeles takes an enormous number of roll calls, 21,344 on Raman’s seat in under six years, which is why a member can miss thousands of votes without missing much of the year. She sat for 604 meeting days, was present for every roll call on 423 of them, and missed every roll call on 75. A single day, November 22, 2022, cost her 117 votes.

So “2,966 votes” overstates the share of her time, and 13.90 percent is the fairer framing. The Bass campaign used both.

The count measures attendance at recorded floor votes, not hours worked. Committee meetings, where most council business is shaped, are nowhere in this record.

The first Friday of the month

Mayor Garcetti appointed Raman to the AQMD governing board in February 2022. Her term ended January 15, 2026, when Councilmember Adrin Nazarian succeeded her. The board “usually meets at South Coast AQMD’s Diamond Bar headquarters on the first Friday of each month,” per the agency’s own description, at 9 a.m. The council meets Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, generally at 10. Diamond Bar is thirty miles east of City Hall.

The two bodies collide on the first Friday and only on the first Friday. If the explanation holds, her absences should stack there, switch on in February 2022, and switch off in January 2026. All three happen.

During her term Raman missed 85.8 percent of first-Friday council votes against 12.9 percent on every other day. The council median on first Fridays is 15.0 percent.

The measure that isolates a standing conflict is the gap between the two, because a member who is absent constantly is absent on first Fridays too. Gil Cedillo missed 56.2 percent of first Fridays and 49.2 percent of everything else, so the day of the month tells you nothing about him. Raman’s gap is 72.9 points. The next largest belongs to Joe Buscaino at 29.4, then Nazarian at 27.9. Nazarian now holds her air district seat.

We checked two of those days against the air district’s own minutes. On August 1, 2025, Raman missed all 38 council roll calls and reached the board meeting at 9:08 a.m. On February 2, 2024, she voted on all 21 council roll calls and the AQMD minutes list her as absent. She could not have been at both.

How big that block is

Raman’s own baseline answers it. During her term she missed 12.9 percent of votes on every day that was not a first Friday. Applied to the 712 first-Friday votes she faced, that predicts about 92 absences. She recorded 611. The excess is an estimated 519 votes, 17 percent of her career total. It is a difference between two rates rather than a list of 519 dated conflicts; the two dates checked against the board’s minutes are above.

Widening the definition does not rescue the claim.

Even the most generous reading stops at 39 percent, and “most” needs more than half. 1,799 of her 2,966 absences, 61 percent, fall on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when the air district does not meet.

The days the air district doesn’t meet

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Raman’s absence rate is 10.5 percent. That puts her eleventh of the twenty-three members who have served since December 2020: ten were absent more often, twelve less often, against a council median of 9.8 percent. She sits within a tenth of a point of Katy Yaroslavsky and Traci Park.

The spread on either side of her is wide. Cedillo missed 27.5 percent of Tuesday and Wednesday votes, Kevin de León 20.9 and Curren Price 20.4; at the other end Mitch O’Farrell missed 2.2 percent and Hugo Soto-Martinez 3.7.

Raman’s overall number is high because she took a second appointment that met at the same hour as her first job and chose it almost every time. On the days that conflict did not exist, her attendance is ordinary.

The Times’ ranking

The Los Angeles Times reported that Raman missed the second-most meetings of any councilmember between the start of 2025 and this summer, behind only Price, who was ill for much of that time. That checks out. Counting days a member missed every single roll call, from January 1, 2025 through August 12, 2026:

Second place is correct as stated. Net of the first Fridays she falls to third, behind Price and Rodriguez.

Absences between recorded votes

A third kind of absence sits in this file: a missed vote between two recorded votes.

Each roll call carries a sequential number, so the file preserves the order the votes were taken. Take a member who casts a vote, is missing from the next roll call, and is back for the one after. The file records the two votes and the gap, and nothing about where the member was in between or how long it lasted.

That happened 8,466 times across the council since December 2020. For Raman it happened 790 times, a quarter of her total, and the part of her record that neither the air district nor a missed morning explains.

A member with a financial conflict is required to recuse, and the City Clerk’s system has no token for it: a recusal, an abstention, a deliberate refusal to be counted, and a walk to the bathroom all enter the file as the same word. The dataset’s own documentation says the column “cannot be decomposed from this source alone.”

So we tested a hypothesis about what a recusal would leave in the file. It should be short, because a conflict attaches to one item rather than to the ones around it, and it should be isolated: the rest of the council votes and one seat does not. Neither property identifies a recusal on its own, and both are also produced by ordinary absence.

Across the council, a single-seat absence occurred 995 times. Curren Price accounts for 198, Monica Rodriguez 158, Marqueece Harris-Dawson 102, Raman 96. At the other end John Lee has 2 and Mitch O’Farrell none.

We do not yet know how many are recusals. The rate correlates with how often a member is absent generally at r = 0.67, which is what you would expect if most of it is ordinary in-and-out. Raman’s 790 scatter across unrelated subject matter and cluster on particular dates rather than particular council files, which fits time away from the chamber better than it fits an item-specific conflict, though this source cannot separate the two. And 592 of her 790 sit in runs of four or more consecutive votes, a long time to be recused on one item.

The isolated single-item absences are a separate case, and nobody has counted them. Reading them properly means going item by item against each member’s Form 700, the lobbying file and the council file numbers, matching a specific economic interest to a specific vote a specific member declined to cast. That work is underway and it will be its own piece. The chart below is where it starts.