The most basic function of our elected representatives is to vote on and enact legislation. But every year, due to a variety of reasons, legislators miss votes, sometimes important ones.

Much has been said about congressmen abdicating their responsibilities while out stumping. Michele Bachmann missed almost 90 votes while campaigning in 2012 and candidates often accuse their opponents of caring more about their reelections than representing their constituents.

Now that the campaigns for the 2014 elections are gaining steam, I took a look at this year's voting data to see if indeed legislators with the most incentives to campaign -- those in the most competitive districts -- were consistently missing votes in Congress. I wanted to see if this was a systemic problem, rather than something that happened on a district by district basis.

Your gut reaction to this chart is probably right: it doesn't show anything. There is essentially no correlation between the competitiveness of a district in the 2012 election and the amount of votes that the legislator from that district missed. Let's take a look at every legislator's voting record so far this year and see if there are any surprising revelations about swing districts.

Once again, nothing particularly stands out, other than some incredible absence totals by particular representatives. Swing districts are almost evenly spaced out throughout the spectrum of missed vote totals. What if we break it down by type of state? Maybe the political leaning of a state -- solidly Democrat, solidly Republican, and swing state -- might influence the behavior of legislators in competitive districts.

Even among states of different political leanings, there doesn't seem to be any particular correlation between more competitive districts and missed votes. Though, not unsurprisingly, the distribution of missed votes is fairly similar across all charts.