Politics

Sunlight in New Mexico is growing!

By Noah Kunin

LATE UPDATE: It was a fast and furious committee session in New Mexico today. The House Rules committee made do-pass recommendations on three bills that have serious transparency implications. The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government has the rundown:

HR1, HR2 and HR3, which would provide live audio and video streaming of the House floor, live audio or video streaming of House committees, and next-day online posting of House votes, respectively.

These bills address several issues that affect transparency. HR3 is of particular interest to me – currently, if you want a record of how your legislator voted in New Mexico you need to obtain it as a paper document – in person!

In a modern legislature where thousands of votes can be taken each session, this is unacceptable. We’re analyzing HR3 right now to see what all the implications of passage would be.

Online voting records shouldn’t stop there. In 2007, the Open House Project recommended that committees should also archive and publish their votes online:

Rather than leaving public access and the historic record to the variable discretion of the committee chairs, the House should require that all committees publish their proceedings online shortly after they occur.

One major shortcoming already of HR3 is that it would only compel the House to publish their votes 24 hours after they were taken. There’s no technical reason voting records couldn’t be published in real-time.

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In Minnesota, where I spent most of my political life matriculating, there’s a video feed for almost every part of the State legislature. House floor, Senator floor, the key committees – pretty much everything. When committees didn’t have a live feed, the press and citizen journalists fought (and won) for the right to broadcast what goes on in state government.

New Mexico is just starting to webcast the deliberative floors of their legislative body: video in the Senate and audio in the House.

The New Mexico Independent, an online news site, has been doing yeoman’s work in extending that webcasting (using their own resources) to key committees. Even when live video is not available, they’re live blogging the proceedings in real time.

This kind of access to our government doesn’t have a price tag. We’re joining them on the liveblog to help ensure public access to government proceedings and to help provide analysis and research on the goings on of the New Mexico legislature.

To find out more on webcasting in New Mexico read the New Mexico Independent’s take on the current state of play here and possible upcoming votes on webcasting here.

Join us using the live blog below!

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on January 29, 2010 (boomark / email).