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Simply unacceptable

By Caleb O. Brown

How long does it take to get last night’s baseball scores? Many Web sites allow you to get results with a few clicks of the mouse. You can even monitor games – pitch by pitch – as they are being played.

Thanks to the Internet, you can follow the statistics of your favorite teams and players more easily than ever before. And you can do it all without actually seeing any games.

Contrast the ease of our ability to get sports scores with the Kentucky General Assembly’s laborious policy of providing information to voters.

If you want to know how your senator voted on a particular day, you must call the Senate clerk to get paper copies of the roll-call votes. Be prepared to pay the going rate of 15 cents per page to have them mailed to you.

The accommodating House and Senate clerks will fax a few pages at a time for free if you have access to a fax machine. However, those voting records, the linchpins of effective voter information, are not provided online in any form.

Voters should able to go online, find a bill and click through the information to find how their representatives in the House and Senate voted.

Until this year, accessing information online about how policymakers voted was not possible. Voters wanting a complete record of action taken in the General Assembly were required to spend more than $100 for paper copies of every vote in the legislature. Detailed voting records contained in the House and Senate journals are typically published more than a year after the close of a legislative session.

KentuckyVotes.org was created to give citizens the powerful but user-friendly tools needed to evaluate legislators in the 21st century. The same innovation that puts volumes of sports information at your fingertips will now be put to a more useful purpose – fostering open and effective government.

Technology also has raised the bar for timely news coverage. Armchair newshounds are used to seeing Web pages of media outlets change during the course of the day to reflect new events and developing stories.

Kentuckians should have access to a similarly speedy flow of information when the legislature goes back to work in January. In fact, when we ask citizens if they think their legislators’ votes should be posted online, they invariably respond with: “You mean they’re not online now?”

KentuckyVotes.org is designed to ensure that General Assembly votes are posted online quickly – allowing constituents to follow critical decisions made by their representatives. The site also allows voters to sign up for e-mail updates in order to track individual bills as they move through the legislative process, getting tweaked by various amendments along the way.

Unfortunately, KentuckyVotes.org has been struggling for several weeks to get any electronic copy of the roll-call votes recorded during the 2005 legislative session. The Legislative Research Commission (LRC) required KentuckyVotes.org to file two open-records requests in order to get this information. Even after following the proper procedure and correctly submitting the required forms, the LRC rejected the requests.

This is surprising, considering that the LRC Web site currently provides a number of crucial elements containing important information useful to voters. KentuckyVotes.org links to several hundred individual LRC pages aimed at integrating the two services for the benefit of voters. However, the LRC has never had a policy of giving citizens online access to legislators’ voting records.

Getting access to these records in a convenient form would reduce the risk of human error in posting lawmakers’ voting records. Accuracy will strengthen the credibility of the flow of information sent to inquiring citizens, who will be better equipped to analyze the performance of policymakers.

Voters have the opportunity to engage politicians on the campaign trail, but are relegated to peering over the fence as important policy decisions are made in Frankfort.

When it comes to sports, most of us must be content with being spectators, no matter how much we might cheer or fret about the results. But government should not be a spectator sport.

While legislators regulate your choices, dispense with your hard-earned tax dollars and control your liberties, sitting on the sidelines is simply an unacceptable option.

– Caleb O. Brown is director of KentuckyVotes.org. He can be reached at (270) 782-2140 or brown@bipps.org.

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