The Bass Campaign Counted 2,966 Missed Votes. Its Own Site Counted 20,973 Taken.

Both numbers come off the same city clerk search page. We ran it ourselves, and the share has halved this year.

The number moving this week is 2,966. That's how many Los Angeles City Council votes Councilmember Nithya Raman has missed since she took office in December 2020, according to NoShowNithya.com, the site Mayor Karen Bass's re-election campaign built to make the point. The same page prints the figure 2,966 is divided by, and does the division: 20,973 votes taken, 14.1 percent, one in seven.

The denominator is on the attack site. It is missing from most of the argument the attack site started.

LAist published its own count Monday, drawn from the same city clerk records: nearly 3,000 missed votes since 2020, with Raman eighth among the 15 members this year, third last year and sixth in 2024. The vast majority of the votes she missed were unanimous or near-unanimous, the outlet reported, so her vote would not have changed the outcome. Raman's campaign has pointed back at the mayor's own attendance — an LAist review of records found Bass had skipped more than half the meetings of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority commission, and she announced she was leaving that commission after the reporting.

"This isn't just missing a few votes, it's about six years of Nithya Raman not showing up," Bass campaign spokesperson Alex Stack told LAist. Raman's campaign spokesperson, Liz Garcia, told the outlet that "the data shows that Nithya's attendance is in line with other council members."

As quoted / in context

As quoted. Nearly 3,000 missed votes. Six years. One councilmember.

In context. 2,966 of 20,973, which is the campaign's own pair of numbers. The other side of that fraction is about 18,000 council items on which the clerk records Raman voting. Both sentences describe the same file.

We ran the same query

The campaign's site cites the city clerk's Council Votes Verification System, which is public and searchable by member, date and vote. We pulled it on September 15: for each year, every council vote record where Raman is marked absent, all meeting types, set against every vote taken in the same window.

• December 2020 — 0 missed, of 43 votes taken.
• 2021 — 174 of 3,313. 5.3 percent.
• 2022 — 596 of 3,514. 17.0 percent.
• 2023 — 528 of 3,575. 14.8 percent, and short one meeting day: every query touching May 18, 2023 returns an application error, so that Thursday session is in neither column.
• 2024 — 681 of 3,721. 18.3 percent.
• 2025 — 715 of 4,179. 17.1 percent.
• 2026, through September 15 — 277 of 2,920. 9.5 percent.

That totals 2,971 missed votes out of 21,265 taken, or 14.0 percent, against the campaign's 14.1 percent through August 20. The attack's arithmetic holds.

Our year-by-year counts are not LAist's. The outlet reported 575 missed in 2024 and 556 in 2025 where we count 681 and 715, and 233 so far this year where we count 277; it describes its numbers as an analysis of city clerk data without publishing the query behind them, so the two can't be reconciled from outside. Ours are one row per council vote on which the clerk's system marks her absent, pulled on September 15.

Same query, same window, all fifteen members, January 1 through September 15: Curren Price 920, Bob Blumenfield 603, Adrin Nazarian 498, Traci Park 425, Monica Rodriguez 410, John Lee 409, Katy Yaroslavsky 397, Imelda Padilla 351, Hugo Soto-Martínez 287, Raman 277, Eunisses Hernandez 274, Tim McOsker 253, Heather Hutt 179, Marqueece Harris-Dawson 166, Ysabel Jurado 127. LAist's count put Nazarian highest this year at 393; ours puts him third.

What it excludes

• Why. The clerk's record marks a member absent. It does not say excused, sick, campaigning or at another meeting. Nothing in the 2,966 sorts the reasons, in either direction.
• The air district, measured. Raman's campaign told LAist she was officially excused for meetings of the South Coast Air Quality Management District board, where she sat as the city's representative from 2022. That board, by its own account, "usually meets at South Coast AQMD's Diamond Bar headquarters on the first Friday of each month." LAist described the board as meeting on the last Friday; either way it is one Friday a month. We counted Raman's 2025 absences by date. Of 715 missed votes, 290 fell on a Friday, 251 on a Wednesday and 174 on a Tuesday. On the ten first Fridays the council met and voted, she missed 158 — 22 percent of the year's total. The last Fridays account for 53 more.
• The seat she no longer holds. Bass removed Raman from the air board in January and appointed Nazarian, LAist reported. He sits on the board's current roster. Raman's missed share this year is 9.5 percent, about half her 2024 and 2025 rates, and her Friday absences run 38 so far against 290 across all of 2025. Her Wednesday absences have not moved the same way: 184 in eight and a half months, against 251 for all of last year.
• What a vote is. The clerk's system lists 80 meeting dates with recorded votes through September 15, carrying 2,920 votes: about 36 a day. In 2025 it was 4,179 votes across 114 meeting dates, the same rate. A missed vote is one of roughly three dozen taken that day.

The denominator is on the same ballot

Charter Section 242 requires the council to meet at least three days each week. The clerk's own session list shows what that produces: this year's 80 meeting dates fall on 28 Tuesdays, 27 Wednesdays and 25 Fridays. There were 114 such dates in 2025 and 107 in 2024.

On November 3, voters decide whether to keep the mandate. Charter Amendment EE, the ethics-and-governance package the council placed on the ballot, strikes "at least three days each" week and requires regular weekly meetings instead. The argument in favor, printed in the city's own voter pamphlet, calls the current rule "an unusual mandate that makes Los Angeles an outlier among major American cities." The argument against says the reduction is "buried within" an ethics measure and costs residents the meetings where they get to speak. The county Board of Supervisors, for comparison, meets on Tuesdays.

If EE passes, both halves of this story's fraction shrink. A council that meets once a week takes fewer votes, and its members miss fewer of them, and the next campaign to run this play will have a smaller number to hold up and a smaller one to leave out.

Voters settle both questions on the same ballot: who the mayor is, and what the denominator will be. Divide responsibly.

Sources: NoShowNithya.com, paid for by Re-Elect Karen Bass for Mayor 2026; LAist; the Los Angeles City Clerk's Council Votes Verification System, queried September 15, 2026; South Coast AQMD; the City Clerk's November 3, 2026 ballot measure texts; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. All retrieved September 15, 2026.