Greetings from Poland, a land of many processed meats.
Last month we requested that the City Commissioners' Office, whose only job is to oversee elections- put detailed election returns online. Seems sort of basic in 2008, right?
Well, we were denied, basically with a plea of technological incompetence. The City said that they have created a system where only 150 people at a time can look at results, or else everything crashes. Can someone remind me why we pay the salary of three elected officials for this?
At any rate, today we appealed, with a very sweet and kind letter, the text of which is below.
The catch is that we have been told by multiple sources that Commissioners' office charges some groups (the media generally) a bunch of money for access, while giving away access to other people. This has raised a whole new set of questions.
Going through this long of a process, just to see election returns is a real "only in Philadelphia" moment...
This letter is to formally appeal the June 6th decision of the City Commissioners Office, denying our request for unofficial election results. We believe the decision is incorrect under Pennsylvania’s right-to-know law and the Commissioners’ own mission statement. Additionally, because the decision raises additional questions about how the Commissioners’ deliver city services, we now expand our request.
Despite the fact the City receives voting returns electronically (from a multi-million dollar, voter-approved upgrade to voting machines less than ten years ago), you have offered to let us, days after the election, view paper printouts of election returns. For an office that only has one real job, overseeing elections, and a generous budget, we find this response lacking and inconsistent with PA right-to-know law. 65 P.S. § 66.1 et seq.
Furthermore, the response has only raised additional question and concerns about how the Commissioners’ Office functions. We are of information and belief that the Commissioners’ Office has given away a number of passwords to certain individuals and campaigns, allegedly for free. As such, your denial of our request raises additional questions about how your office decides who is worthy of receiving one of the 150 passwords that you say are available, and how you decide to charge them. To put it mildly, it is not the role of an elected officer to decide which citizens get to view election returns and which do not. Nor is it acceptable to grant free access to some, while charging others.
We believe that, generally, right-to-know statutes don’t deal well with requests for election returns because it is unthinkable that in a democracy in 2008, some citizens can view voting records instantly, while others cannot.
And so, in addition to appealing your decision, we now request the following:
1) The exact price the city charges for access to election returns. Please include any and all contract terms, as well as the Commissioners’ justification for those terms under the ‘reasonable fee’ standard of electronic access under the PA right-to know-law. Please include receipts of all payments received from the last 24 months.
2) The exact number of passwords the office has given out, along with how much each recipient was charged (including if they were charged nothing).
3) Any and all guidance from the Commissioners’ Office on who may receive a password to examine returns, and whether that password shall be free.
4) Any and all public notice from the Commissioners’ Office to notify the public that citizens may apply for a password.
5) A list of all those people who have free passwords to examine election data.We find your plea of technological incompetence to be troubling for an office whose sole purpose is to oversee elections. That said, we find it even more troubling that it appears you are using that excuse to grant privileged access to the connected few.
Very truly yours,
/s/
Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg
Oh the irony
I forgot to mention, the request was denied by Fred Voight, former head of the... Committee of Seventy.
I am all for pursuing the free-electronic-for-all
But have you taken up the office's offer to give you a paper copy of the records?
It was never the issue
At some point after the election, they print them out, too. That was already available.
Any plans to contact the
Any plans to contact the City Solicitor or the Court of Common Pleas?
done
This letter was sent directly to the City Solicitor.
Why are the records password protected in the first place?
As I see it, there are three main questions:
1. Why are the records password protected in the first place? If the issue is that the system can only handle 150 users, either make one of the users the public and/or limit the number of concurrent users of the system (and place a time limit and kick people off after a fixed period of time to free up access slots), or better yet fix the system.
2. Why is the City Commissioners' office using the selling of passwords to generate revenue to access public information? Don't we pay taxes that are used to provide a budget for the Commissioners' Office?
3. Why can't they fix their system so that more than 150 users at a time can look at the records? In terms of the last point, I, along with many other people who do web design and content could fix this issue or implement a solution in a day or two at the most, at no cost to the City. Or if their technology is dysfunctional an external solution could be found and implemented. For example, the records could be made available to the public as an online spreadsheet via EditGrid, which would have no cost to the City and would have the records be available on servers that allow unlimited people to access them at the same time.
I don't have a password
in case anyone is wondering. I've worked on campaigns where some politically-connected person had one, and thus I had easy-to-work-with numbers for figuring out likely electoral performance and where to spend campaign time and resources.
But since I usually work on campaigns that are running against the politically-connected, I usually have to mess around with paper results, and thus I either have to work out electoral solutions on paper or laboriously enter information into a spreadsheet. Usually, it's some combination of both.
I'm glad Dan's pursuing this, and I look forward to an end to our current undemocratic and forest-massacring practices. Yet it seems to me that Philly's password protecting local election results is only one particularly egregious example of a fairly ubiquitous problem.
It's too hard to get electoral results and common voter information in a lot of places in the U.S..
Ultimately, i think, there needs to be a federal law requiring that all detailed unofficial election results are posted online for general access within a month of election day, and once they're certified, detailed results should be so posted too.
We're way too cavalier about elections in general in this country.
Thanks for writing
I think it is good to have discussion out there from people who have worked with and within the current system.
elp, now you are in trouble
Confusing the issue with technological facts, I mean.
The point is not that the Commissioner's office can fix the problem in various ways to share the data electronically more effectively with the public - at no extra cost to the city. The point is they don't want to - and that selling limited numbers of passwords (or giving them to allies) is a really handy way to make the Commissioner's office of greater political importance. More important that it would be if they, for example, just did their job as defined by law.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Another Right-to-Know request pending at the Commissioners' Offi
I have a related request pending. I've asked for detailed election results in electronic form for municipal races (such as for Mayor) that are not archived by the Department of State. (By the way, the electronic results are available, with several months delay, from the Dept. of State for all state races, including state house and legislature, and court of common pleas.)
A few years ago I had success with a similar suit against the Department of State of PA. (See http://www.campaignscientific.com/PressClippings/070719PhilaInky.htm).
Please contact me! We may be able to make our individual cases stronger by working together.
--Stephanie Frank Singer
Why the results are password-protected
I absolutely agree that election results should not be password-protected. I believe they should be available for easy search and download from the web, just as campaign finance information is easily downloadable or searchable at the federal FEC website. And PA law requires that they be, at the very least, available in bulk in electronic form.
However, I understand why, from a historical perspective, the results are password-protected. It dates from the days when newspapers were the main source of the public's information about elections. No, Virginia, there was not always an internet. In order to get results quickly, newspapers funded the infrastructure necessary to disseminate results. I suspect that the main paying customers for the PhillyElections website are still traditional news outlets such as the Inquirer. The Commissioners' Office is accustomed to this extra income. So when electronic voting machines came along, they set up an electronic system to get results to their paying customers (the news outlets).
It's time for the Commissioners' Office to join the 21st Century! Suits like ours are the impetus they need.
voter registration records
I remember asking for voter registration file (at the time it was for research only) and being told that maybe I could get them on some kind of dinosaur cassette. HAVA changed all that, but they have been using the "technological deficiency" argument for quite a while...
I got the technological deficiency answer
when we had requested specific BPT data (a very nice guy in the Law Department assured me that Revenue can't even give HIM the numbers he asks for because they don't have a program that can run specific queries on the tax data).
I bought it, basically, and then felt kind of stupid when Dan asked me, "if they can't run queries on their data, how did they create that spreadsheet of aggregate numbers they sent us? Magically?"