If you want to know how your legislator voted on one particular bill, it's easy enough to find that out. Look up the bill number online and follow the prompts that guide you to all the committee and floor votes taken on that piece of legislation. They will reveal which legislators voted for or against it.
But if you wanted to know something more, like how your representative voted on all bills related to air pollution or to teacher tenure issues or to auto insurance – well, good luck. Obtaining that kind of information could take days or weeks of research.
And if you wanted to do even more sophisticated tracking – to find patterns in a legislator's votes that showed possible connections between campaign contributions from a particular interest group with a stake in legislation, forget it. It's almost impossible.
The data is there to answer those questions, and it's supposed to be public. But so far, the Legislature's lawyer has refused to release it in a format that enables citizens to easily track voting trends over time or make correlations between votes and campaign contributions.
Legislative Counsel Diane Boyer-Vine has made print-outs of such data available, but refuses to release the electronic database used to compile the information. She claims that the California Public Records Act "does not require disclosure of the database itself."
Political watchdog and open-records groups rightly dispute that narrow interpretation of the law. Two of those groups – MAPLight .org, a Berkeley-based group that follows money in politics at the congressional level and wants to do the same in California – and the California First Amendment Coalition – have sued to force the Legislature to give up its electronic voting records database. They argue that the law requires government to release public information in any format they possess.
A glance at MAPLight's Web site (www.MAPLight.org) makes it clear why California legislators might want to block access to the data the organization seeks. Using an electronic database, MAPLight has collected and aggregated congressional campaign contribution and voting records in a way that allows the public to see with a click of the mouse which interest groups are the biggest campaign contributors to individual lawmakers and how lawmakers vote on issues that those contributors care about. No doubt some of that information will prove embarrassing to some legislators, but that's no reason to deny the public access to it.
This struggle for basic information about how the Legislature functions ought to be an easy early test for Darrell Steinberg, the new Senate president pro tem. It's absurd that the public should have to sue to get this information. Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass ought to order their lawyers to make the data available now. Who contributes to legislative campaigns, and how much, is clearly public information. How legislators vote is public too.
Moreover, the public pays for all the computers and software that records, collects and stores that information. Citizens own it and they ought to have access to it in any format they choose.
About Comments
Reader comments on Sacbee.com are the opinions of the writer, not The Sacramento Bee. If you see an objectionable comment, click the "report abuse" button below it. We will delete comments containing inappropriate links, obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks. Flagrant or repeat violators will be banned. See more about comments here.