Excel shouldn’t serve as load-bearing infrastructure. Its files can’t be diffed, version controlled, or tested. Virginia’s failure shows the cost of doing so.
Category Archives: Virginia Politics
Vote ”yes“ on VA’s redistricting constitutional amendment.
Gerrymandering persists because it’s the rational choice for elected officials. The way electoral districts are drawn in most of the U.S. is that state legislators decide what they want their districts to look like. The majority party that controls the legislature draws their own districts to allow them to cruise to reelection, using fancy redistricting …
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Déjà vu.
I’ve watched the drip-drip-sploosh of revelations about Bob McDonnell’s with a sense of recognition. As the charges become more serious (daughter’s wedding yields to Rolex yields to $50,000 to McDonnell’s wife yields to $70,000 to McDonnell’s business), it’s feeling a lot like the financial improprieties that accompanied his 2005 campaign for attorney general. In 2005, …
Kluge subpoenaed.
Patricia Kluge has been subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury investigating Gov. Bob McDonnell. (Previously.)
Ethics training in the governor’s office.
The ethics records that the attorney general’s office refuses to give me didn’t present an obstacle for Gov. Bob McDonnell’s office. Here are the records of when the employees of that office—including Gov. McDonnell—have received their legally-mandated ethics training: Gov. McDonnell’s Office Ethics Training Records (PDF) Gov. McDonnell’s Office Ethics Training Records (Text) (Because employees …
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A Virginia campaign finance API.
Last year, I wrote here that I was working on an open-source campaign finance parser for Virginia State Board of Elections data. Thanks to the good work of the folks at the SBE, who are making enormous advances in opening up their data, I’ve been able to make some great progress on this recently. That …
Cuccinelli’s self-inflicted FOIA gunshot wound.
This time last week, I got a surprise in the mail. A couple of weeks prior, I had sent requests to both the governor and the attorney general’s offices for some pretty boring records—a list of everybody in their offices who had received the ethics training prescribed under the law. These records are explicitly FOIAable, …
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Make money from home! (Even if your home is the governor’s mansion.)
Many months ago, an acquaintance was invited to join a small gathering at the estate of erstwhile Charlottesville-area millionaire Patricia Kluge. Kluge was inviting some women over to a brunch at Albemarle House, an event at which the honored guest was Virginia’s first lady, Maureen McDonnell. Unbeknownst to the invitees, the host was teetering on …
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New site, new datasets.
Since creating Richmond Sunlight and Virginia Decoded, I’ve been building up a public trove of datasets about Virginia government: legislative video, the court system’s definitions of legal terms, court rulings, all registered dangerous dogs, etc. But they’re all scattered about on different websites. A couple of years ago, I slapped together a quick site to …
Senator Henry Marsh’s big day.
Today was a big day for Senator Henry Marsh. The legislator of twenty years took a rare day off during the Virginia Senate’s 46-day session, to attend President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration in Washington D.C. For the 79-year-old black civil rights lawyer, attending a black president’s inauguration on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is perhaps …