FW: Letter on Senate Vote Transparency

[Jones, Tom (Commerce)]

Transparency Folks,

 

As some of you may remember a while back I asked for some input on Senate votes in XML. 

 

Following up on that, Senator DeMint is circulating the attached letter for signatures.  The letter urges the Rules Committee to make votes available in XML.  You guys know the virtues of XML so I am not going to belabor that issue too much.

 

What I would like to ask though is that you reach out to your contacts in the Senate and ask them to sign the letter.   I know the Senator would really appreciate it. 

 

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Thanks

Tom

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________________
From: Hoskins, Matt (DeMint)
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 2:51 PM
To: Jones, Tom (Commerce)
Subject: Letter on Senate Vote Transparency

 

 

The attached letter asks the Senate Rules Committee to modernize the way the Senate provides information about roll call votes. This simple change will greatly improve Senate transparency.

 

Politico had an article on Monday that highlighted how the Senate has fallen behind in providing Americans with information. For years the House of Representatives has provided roll call votes to the public in a format that allows them to be easily read, processed, and shared with the public. Unfortunately the Senate continues to present roll call votes in an antiquated format that prevents easy analysis and dissemination of Senators’ votes.

 

If your boss would like to sign this letter or if you have questions about this issue, please contact Tom Jones at 4-7867 or tom_...@commerce.senate.gov. 

 

Matt Hoskins

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint

 

 

 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21726.html

 

 

Online voting records user unfriendly By: Victoria McGrane April 27, 2009 04:32 AM EST

In January 1995, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich cut the virtual ribbon on the first-ever online congressional clearinghouse — a moment hailed as a breakthrough in government transparency. But 14 years later, a voter still can’t use it to pull up an individual lawmaker’s voting history. The House and Senate websites list roll call votes by bill number in chronological order, with no way to search or filter votes by member. Click a “congressional voting” link on THOMAS, the congressional website Gingrich unveiled in 1995, and you’ll get a page acknowledging that “users of the THOMAS system often ask where they can get voting records for their members of Congress” — followed by nearly 800 words about how hard it is to compile an individual member’s records and why the results might not be very meaningful, anyway. Transparency advocates aren’t amused. “It’s really hard to come up with a complete picture of your representative as a constituent by using the tools that are currently available,” said John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit group dedicated to opening up government via the Internet. Web technology has surged forward since the mid-1990s, when The New York Times had to explain that Gingrich’s plan would put congressional data on the “World Wide Web,” a place where people could “use a new generation of software to jump from site to site and subject to subject just by clicking on icons or words.” Congress has moved quickly to adopt the Web for its own purposes. Today, more members of the Senate use Twitter than even had e-mail addresses in 1995. But Congress has moved slowly, at best, to make its vast stores of public information more accessible to the hungry masses online. Some lawmakers — Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) among them — have their staffs compile and post their votes on their personal sites. But some other members who’d like to share their voting records find the work too labor intensive for limited staff budgets. This is especially true in the House, where members take many more roll call votes than occur in the Senate. Various outside groups have taken it upon themselves to do the often painstaking work of culling vote data and other public legislative information. The Washington Post provides a searchable voting-record database, and some interest groups track votes on key bills that deal with their interest areas — abortion rights or guns, for example. Others, like the nonprofit GovTrack.us, have created automated programs to pull vote and legislative data from congressional websites and then display the information in user-friendly formats that allow voters to search for one member’s votes or even all the bills a member co-sponsored (as opposed to being the lead sponsor) in a certain year — something else THOMAS won’t let a user do. And then there are services, such as Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call’s Gallery Watch, that charge users big bucks for access to more sophisticated online databases of congressional information. Rep. Melissa Bean (D-Ill.) believes that voting record transparency is important enough that Congress should provide voters direct access to the information. “Coming out of the business world, I think results matter. How can people really track results if they don’t even know how their representatives are voting?” said Bean, who owned her own consulting business before taking office. She has introduced legislation, with bipartisan co-sponsors, that would direct the House clerk to sort roll call votes by member and require members to provide a link on their websites — sites that happen to be funded by taxpayers, she points out. When it comes to roll call votes, transparency advocates of the technological bent say the House is worlds better than the Senate because the House clerk provides the XML files behind the votes — language that looks like a database to a computer and allows developers to easily reuse the data on their own websites. The Senate clerk’s office has resisted providing that information, despite being pressed by open government advocates, said Wonderlich. The reason they’ve been given: “The secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy ... that they’re not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to,” Wonderlich said. “It’s pretty bad.” When POLITICO sought to confirm this reasoning, the secretary’s office directed inquiries to the Senate Rules Committee. A spokeswoman at the Rules Committee said she was unable to find someone who could answer the question. J.H. Snider, president of iSolon.org, a think tank dedicated to using information technology to further democracy, said there’s a qualitative difference between making information public and making it “meaningfully” public — that is, in the easiest, most logical and most timely way. But “lawmakers want to maintain as much control as possible over their records; they want to be able to highlight what’s useful,” he said. “They have nothing to gain by making it easy for opposition candidates to do research and whatnot.”  The Sunlight Foundation and other transparency advocates have focused not on getting Congress to improve its own websites but, rather, on allowing free access to legislative information behind THOMAS and other sites in raw, electronic form. The theory is that outside developers can remix that data using the most advanced Web technology. Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) inserted a simple paragraph into the statement accompanying the 2009 omnibus spending bill that represents a major step forward in that effort. The language expressed support for enhancing public access to electronic legislative information and directed the Library of Congress and other entities to report back on the feasibility of allowing free downloads of bulk legislative data. “Providing no-charge legislative databases will enable the public to create new and innovative websites. These sites can then leverage Web 2.0 technologies to provide representatives with feedback that can lead to improved public policy and government efficiency,” Honda said in a statement. Honda’s office is working closely with President Barack Obama’s technology office on the issue, and Honda also is in discussions with the Government Printing Office about making its legislative data free. The GPO currently sells a lot of the information the techies want but charges hefty fees. Once transparency groups can get their hands on Congress’ raw legislative data, Wonderlich said, “there are a lot of other more insightful, interesting things that might come from it.” And merely posting documents on the Internet any old way is not enough, tech-savvy transparency hawks contend. “This is 2009. This information should be available in a relational database that is searchable and sortable and digestible in any form we want it,” said Dave Lundy, acting executive director of the Chicago-based Better Government Association. “Taxpayers pay for this information.” “It’s a strategy to make information hard to find and hard to digest and hard to analyze,” Lundy said. “Call me a cynic, but I don’t ... think [government entities] deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have ample experience to know that people try to hide information, even in plain sight.”

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

 

 

[Jones, Tom (Commerce)]

A couple follow-ups:

 

1.       I was delinquent in not thanking Josh Tauberer and John Wonderlich for their help with the letter.  Those guys were a huge help.  Thanks!

2.       Sen Vitter will sign. 

3.       A mechanical detail for what it’s worth, the email that Matt Hoskins (Senator DeMint’s LD) sent went to all Republican and Democrat LDs.  

4.       And we haven’t set a deadline yet – going to gauge response – but it’ll be out there for at least a week. 

 

THJ