But the state’s ethics guidelines still allow voting on bills that could benefit a prospective employer. The guidelines say lawmakers can debate — and vote — on bills that would benefit a “significant portion” of an industry. It’s only a problem if the bill specifically affects the prospective employer.

For example, a member of parliament vying for a job at a major technology company can continue to vote on laws that affect all technology companies – and not just the company that will pay him.

According to a CalMatters review, no California lawmaker has been charged with violating the regulations recently.

Still, Jones-Sawyer says the risks are simply not worth it for him as a Black man who has visited prisons as part of his efforts to change the justice system that disproportionately punishes men like him.

“I don’t want to be the first,” he said.

California’s latest lobbyist defectors

In 2017, lawmakers changed the rules governing the one-year cooling-off period to prohibit lawmakers who leave office during a two-year legislative session from lobbying lawmakers during the current legislative session and for one year afterward.

The rule change came after several prominent lobbyists defected.

Democrat Michael Rubio of Kern County abruptly left the Senate in 2013 to work for Chevron because he wanted to spend more time with his family. He later became a lobbyist for the oil company.

In 2015, Henry Perea, a Democrat from Fresno, left the legislature to work for a pharmaceutical association and then lobbied for the Western States Petroleum Association.

Most recently, Jim Frazier, a Democrat from Fairfield, resigned in 2021 to take a job in the transportation sector after serving as chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee. He is now a lobbyist for the Arc of California, a group that advocates for people with disabilities.

The latest defector during the midterm election was Rep. Lorena Gonzalez, a longtime labor rights activist who left the 2022 legislative session mid-session to become the chair of the California Labor Federation, one of the most influential groups in the pro-union, Democratic-controlled legislature.

Gonzalez has never registered as a lobbyist and she says it was never necessary.

The state’s lobbying rules say a politician-turned-lawyer only has to register as a lobbyist if he spends “at least one-third of his paid time in a calendar month in direct communication” with politicians and their staff. Gonzalez told CalMatters she doesn’t spend nearly that much time talking politics with her former colleagues.

She said she had also been careful not to discuss any specific draft legislation with her former colleagues during her mandatory maternity leave.

“The MPs called me and asked, ‘Can I talk to you about this?'” she told Calmatters. “And I said, ‘Well, you can talk to me, but I can’t answer.'”

Gonzalez said after the Labor Federation offered her a job, she knew she would be leaving the Assembly in July 2022, so she decided to resign in January of that year to avoid spending six months putting herself at risk of bias on bills she cared deeply about.

Voting rules conceal formal rejections

If MPs do indeed recuse themselves from voting because of a potential employer’s conflict of interest – or for any other reason – it will be difficult for the public to detect.

As CalMatters reported in several articles this year, lawmakers routinely remain silent when it comes to voting on bills. Not voting counts as much as a no vote, and lawmakers dodge thousands of contentious votes each year to avoid responsibility and avoid angering colleagues or influential lobbying organizations.

On the state’s official law enforcement website, a non-vote is recorded only as “NVR” (short for “No Vote Recorded”). The same applies if a representative was absent with an excuse or declared themselves absent due to a conflict of interest. This also applies to pending job openings.

According to Digital Democracy’s database, California’s 120 legislators have cast more than 17,000 votes so far this year.

The Digital Democracy database, which uses artificial intelligence to record every word spoken in parliamentary hearings, has found only two examples since 2023 of MPs discussing assertiveness in votes on draft legislation.

Republican Senator Roger Niello, whose family owns car dealerships in the Sacramento area, has refused to attend a hearing on a 2023 bill dealing with car dealerships.

Rep. Joe Patterson, another Sacramento-area Republican, abstained from voting on a 2023 bill addressing charging ports for portable electronic devices such as smartphones. Patterson’s wife works for Apple.

In both cases, the denials were recorded as NVRs on the state’s official law enforcement website.

Government ethics experts say Californians have a right to more transparency.

They argue that the public has a right to know whether their representatives’ non-votes were legitimate absences, abstentions or formal recusals due to conflicts of interest, including pending job offers. “If there were conflicts of interest, it should be noted,” said McMorris of California Common Cause.

Jessica Levinson, founding director of the Public Service Institute at Loyola Law School, said the public has a right to know “why their representatives are not speaking up.”

“Is it because they have something to do that day, because they don’t want to take a stand,” she said, “or because they couldn’t because of the rules?”

Hans Poschman and Thomas Gerrity, members of the CalMatters Digital Democracy team, contributed to this story.

Editor’s note: CalMatters staff are members of a union affiliated with the California Labor Federation.