Open Government

Misc.

l3wis June 5, 2012 6Comments

I have a few tidbits I wanted to share, so I thought I would just throw it all into one post.

MUSICAL PRECINCTS

I sent this email out today to the entire SF school board, Minnehaha county commission, SF City Council, city clerk, county auditor and mayor. I have already gotten two responses that are very positive;

Normally I do not email my elected officials, especially the entire city council, the county commission, the school board, the mayor, the city clerk and the county auditor all at once, but I did a recent post about the ‘musical precincts’ this city continues to play with elections and the mass confusion it has on voters. It’s time you all sat down in a room and figured out a standard already, this has gone on long enough!

As soon as most of them get back to me about it, I will do an indepth post about it.

LATE FILINGS

Ellis blogged about the supposed investigations the SOS’ office is going to conduct AFTER the election (yeah, that makes a lot of sense);

Secretary of State Jason Gant said his office will begin investigating a number of campaign finance violations as soon as Tuesday’s primary is concluded.

“We will begin investigating Wednesday morning,” he said while touring a polling place at Hawthorne Elementary in Sioux Falls.

Some groups have not filed required campaign finance reports, even though they’ve sent out flyers. Other committees have sent out illegal mailings that do not include the appropriate disclaimers.

“Tomorrow we are full steam ahead on working out those issues,” he said. “If they are not filing, we’re going to find out.”

I have often thought instead of fining late filings (of candidates) they should just leave their names off of the ballot. If you file late, you lose your opportunity to run. To heck with silly fines, if you can’t follow the rules you don’t get to play the game. As for the PAC’s I think you should revoke their status.

ARE EMAIL’S OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS PUBLIC RECORD

Ellis also blogged today about his battle with city hall over public records from an administration of ‘one of the most transparent’ mayor’s ever 🙂

“The law includes data, data fields and e-mail in its definition of public records, and it lets citizens bring their own devices to a government agency to make electronic copies. Georgia thus joins a growing number of states that explicitly open electronic communication to and from government officials to the public.”

I’ve written before about how backward South Dakota’s open record laws are. Many states make emails among government officials public records. South Dakota is also the rare state in which police reports aren’t available to the public. Oh, and mugshots.

As for data fields, I’ve been fighting to get the names of data fields used by the city of Sioux Falls in a database since December.

Ellis makes a good point. Why can’t we see emails? It would put rumors to rest about how involved the mayor is in local politics and his supposed quest for higher office. As for the data fields, I know what this is about, but I will let Ellis break this story, that is if he gets the data.