Taxpayer Group Pushes General Assembly to Put Votes Online

Taxpayer Group Pushes General Assembly to Put Votes Online

House Speaker Gordon Fox has committed to making votes of the General Assembly easily accessible online by the start of the next session, his spokesman said yesterday.

The announcement comes after the state’s largest taxpayer group, the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, pressed Fox to take action this summer.

“Speaker Fox and Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed have had on-going discussions and they both agree that making more records available to the public on the legislative Web site is a high priority and it will happen for the start of the session in January,” said Larry Berman, a spokesman for Fox. “Both House and Senate staff members are working on the logistics and an announcement of the details will be forthcoming soon.”

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Finding How Your Rep Voted Shouldn’t Be ‘Herculean Task’

The votes are currently published in a way that seems little changed from since the 19th-century. The votes appear in official House and Senate journals which are printed days—sometimes weeks—after the votes are taken, said Bob Flanders, a former Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice who is working for RISC on the issue.

Those journals are available in PDF form on the official General Assembly Web site, but it can be difficult to sort through those documents to find out how a legislator voted. And the large size of the PDF files make it difficult for software to quickly comb through and pull out the votes so they can be re-published, according to Flanders, now an attorney with Hinckley, Allen & Snyder.

“It’s possible to research but only from intensive labor to extract who voted for what and when,” Flanders told GoLocalProv. “This shouldn’t be a herculean task to find out how your representatives voted on something.”

Rhode Island One of Few States Without Votes Online

Rhode Island is currently one of only four states that do not make the votes of its state legislature easily available online, according to Harriet Lloyd, a spokeswoman for RISC.

“RISC has asked that the situation be remediated now, not because it will help voters in this election to know how legislators have voted - the delays have made that impossible - but because it is vital that, beginning on the first day of the coming session, the new system must be in place,” Lloyd said.

“It is also immediately important for citizens to be able to ask candidates - on the record - if they support the concept of electronic reporting and will fight to get it,” Lloyd added.