At first I thought this was a joke, but it's not. From the Keystone State we hear that Pennsylvanian officials have decided not to publish the locations of its polling places. What?
The spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said that they made the decision after considering the bombings in Spain days before the 2004 national elections. (Did anyone tell the folks up in Pennsylvania that the bombings in Spain were of trains, not polling places? Wouldn't it be more logical to beef up security around train stations and rail lines rather than hide the location of polling places?)
Besides running afoul of the state's open records law and making coordinated statewide voter-mobilization strategies more difficult, Pennsylvania's action will make it that much more difficult for citizens to vote. America has enough trouble with its elections without playing hide and seek with the voters. This is beyond ridiculous.
Continue readingFollow The Money
Earlier this week, the Senate passed the FY2008 Labor, HHS and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710). Besides including $150 billion for the various departments, the bill also includes a public access mandate requiring all research funded by the National Institutes of Health be made available to other researchers and the public. The provision has been the Holy Grail of the Open Access Movement, a wide collection of scientists, researchers, universities, libraries, and organizations advocating for the funding of specific medical research. The coalition wants peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature to be made available online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. This, they believe, will be a big step in removing barriers to serious research. After all, this is research done with public dollars.
Sen. James Inhofe tried his best to sabotage the open access provision in the bill with two amendments, one eliminating it entirely and the other gutting it, as Andrew Leonard reports in Salon. Why, you might ask? Leonard says it's no coincidence that in this election cycle the senator has received over $13,000 from one of the largest for-profit publishers of scientific research in the world. The company, Reed-Elsevier, spent a total of $3,380,000 on lobbying in the United States in 2006. Inhofe was the largest recipient of Reed-Elsevier PAC money in 2006.
Continue readingWhy Tuesday?
Why Tuesday?, a cool new non-profit founded by New York attorney and civil rights activist Bill Wachtel, is using the capabilities of the Web 2.0 evolution to strengthen America's democratic process through increased voter participation. Founded in 2005, the group works to make election reform an issue politicians can't dodge. In an interview published this week by the LAist, Why Tuesday? executive director Jacob Soboroff says that their goal is to be the "woodpecker on the conscience of America", and advocate for making voting more secure, accessible and reliable. He says that they don't have the all the answers, but want to make sure election reform is an issue politicians, opinion leaders and ordinary citizens are talking about.
One way they do this is to encourage individuals to become correspondents...interview and video tape politicians on what they believe should be done to strengthen democracy and voting. They then ask the correspondent to post the video on their YouTube group.
Continue readingTranparency in the Election Spotlight
From OMB Watch:
Popular thinking tells us that for any trend, fad or heavily pursued activity, the pendulum will eventually swing back the other way. As we approach the 2008 elections, this may well be the case for government transparency, which, after years of increasing government secrecy, appears to be getting greater attention than ever before.
Elections often seem driven by the hottest or "sexiest" issues of the moment, too often involving more rhetoric and sensationalism than substantive issues of government policy. Most years, government transparency is considered far too dull an issue about the mundane day-to-day operations of government to attract much attention from candidates or voters. But as the presidential primaries approach, there are several indications that this year could include a much higher profile for government transparency as an issue. Continue reading
And the Beat Goes On
Despite repeated denials by some reform groups, the recently passed ethics reforms are full of loopholes. USA Today and The Washington Post are now beginning to report on how "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
None of this is a great surprise, I suppose. That's why it seems to us that transparency -- 21st century style -- may do more to stop bad things from happening than all the new laws that Congress passes.
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There is Another Way
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and a bipartisan bloc of other senators have proposed a constitutional amendment that would overturn Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 Supreme Court decision that is the superstructure of our current election law. Specifically, the court ruled that giving and spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. I find it interesting that Schumer and company would go down this route since the likelihood for success is very small. In order to become law, the measure would have to go through a gauntlet of debates and votes, including winning two-thirds of the votes of Congress, and winning ratification of three-quarters of the states within seven years. Not very realistic.
Let me be clear. I understand the motivation to overturn Buckley. It's long been the big maple tree in the middle on the campaign finance ball field. But most reformers have accepted that it's not going away anytime soon and they've learned to play around it. One way of doing that is to create a campaign finance system that offers a voluntary system of full public financing. When the process is nearly impossible to pass a constitutional amendment, why not consider that route, which is appearing more and more achievable.
Continue readingA New Take On Disclosure?
I know this is a cynical take, but if Congress won’t provide accessible databases of information, maybe we should move in this direction.
Cartoon from the Politico.
Continue readingDebatepedia
Members of high school and college debate teams and ordinary citizens alike have a remarkable new tool for research and honing their rhetorical skills. Debatepedia, a brand new project of the International Debate and Education Association, is a wiki for civil debate and reason.
The idea is that users are able to present the pros and cons of arguments made by scholars, experts, politicians, think tanks and interest and activist groups and other opinion leaders. The views of opinion leaders are usually documentable facts, and Debatepedia allows its users to arrive at a consensus in how those facts are framed. In the process, the site lets its users to present all the info necessary for a debate team member or an average citizen to craft their own position in a rational way with footnotes.
Continue readingSocial Media, Web 2.0 and the California Fires
I know this is off topic for the Sunlight Foundation -- except for how the Web is changing everything -- but our Creative Director passed along these links for how the social media is following, reporting, compiling and sharing information about the California wild fires. We're sure this is just a partial list.
Continue readingGrants for citizen muckrakers
We’re announcing the availability of “mini-grants” of $1,000 to $5,000 to fund original ideas, tools, Web sites, and blogs that create a better, more dynamic relationship between members of Congress and the citizens they represent. See here for the full press release.
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