May 28, 2008Citizens for Sensible Decisions: Re-create the books on this off-the-books PACWe’ve cleared another Roanoke City Council election cycle, but this time around, the residue of it includes more than bad feelings, losers and some new faces on the council dais. It includes a special prosecutor and allegations of candidates and an unregistered political action committee running afoul of state election laws. It also includes what is now an incomplete record of the financing of this election, despite laws that demand a complete, accurate and transparent record. As a data-geek, a journalist who believes fervently that open government is good for everybody, and the purveyor of a database of city council campaign contributions , that troubles me. The record of this election apparently has a signifiant hole in it. How big a hole? Continue reading "Citizens for Sensible Decisions: Re-create the books on this off-the-books PAC" » May 7, 2008Why Nelson Harris went down: Is the answer in the data?What happened to Mayor Nelson Harris Tuesday? Check out the precinct-by-precinct results for the Roanoke Mayoral and City Council races still online at roanoke.com. I think part of the answer to that question is in those columns and rows if you peer into them long enough. Harris, a Democrat, split from his party and backed the independent “For the City” slate for Roanoke City Council in 2006. That ticket roared into office on the strength of victories limited almost exclusively to the populous and vote-rich Southwest quadrant of the city. It seemed precincts home to younger, middle- and upper-class Roanokers were ready to push progress in the city by choosing progressive council members. That set up the conventional wisdom in this election was that heavy turnout in those same precincts in South Roanoke, Raleigh Court and Lee Hi would favor Harris, and might even be enough to give him a victory. The theory didn’t hold up. Continue reading "Why Nelson Harris went down: Is the answer in the data?" » April 30, 2008Updates! Crime and Roanoke City Council campaign finance dataOk, there's probably a joke in there about the overlap between crime and campaign finance data. I'll leave that to you, gentle reader. Feel free to offer your jokes in a comment on this entry. In the meantime, we happily report that our Roanoke Valley and Salem crime maps are once again updated through the most recent weekend's offenses. And our database of donations over $100 to Roanoke City Council and mayoral candidates for 2006 and the current campaign is up to date through reports filed by the 10 candidates on Monday, April 28. That's a darn quick turnaround that allows you to see who is financing these campaigns within days of when the checks were written in some cases. In all, 76 new itemized contributions were added. (Donations under $100 aren't itemized.) Again, many thanks to our friends and colleages at the Virginia Public Access Project, who turned the paper reports filed in Roanoke into the electronic data we offer you in the DataSphere. VPAP, in case you don't know by now, offers online searching of an extensive database of statewide campaign contributions. (The non-profit also happens to be lead by a former Roanoke Times reporter, David Poole, whose name still causes a few office holders around here to grit their teeth.) April 24, 2008Roanoke City Council elections: Who's giving money to whom, and what do they get in return?Campaign funding for Roanoke City Council races went through the roof in 2006. Comparitively, anyway. With the fate of Victory Stadium in the balance, money rolled into the campaigns, and as it turned out, the cash-infused independent "For the City" ticket swept the election. That prompted cries of the seats being bought by Roanoke's well-heeled, especially the Business Leadership Fund, the political action committee of the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce, which pumped tens of thousands of dollars into the coffers of all three "For the City" candidates -- David Trinkle, Gwen Mason and Alfred Dowe. That election seemed to have changed the game, and brought to local elections, at least in a more significant way, the idea of special interest groups buying influence. It also shined a light on the importance of making more available information on where money to finance political campaigns comes from, even at the local level. You can find that very information for both the 2006 and the current Roanoke City Council elections right now in the DataSphere. Take a look, and see how much the candidates are raising, and from whom. And, just as important, see where in the city is that money coming from, because the addresses of the donors are mapped for you. You can see, for example, that mayoral candidate David Bowers, while he has a hefty warchest with over $15,000 raised, has funded his campaign almost entirely from his own wallet with a personal loan. 
You can also search by donor, and see what kinds of candidates a particular donor tends to support. It's all there, and it's all a matter of public record. Candidates for local office are required to file disclosure forms detailing each contribution with their local voter registrar. The Roanoke Times collects these paper records and, working with the Virginia Public Access Project, converts them to electronic records. Thanks to VPAP for that. VPAP, which maintains a terrific database of statewide campaign finance data, also has information in individual donors, such as their professions, which they add to the data in the public records. So, you tell me, is anyone buying influence in this election? What does it say about our political process, when campaign finance comes from such limited quarters? All those things you hear about special interests funding for in federal and state election campaigns, can they really be problems at the local level, too? February 27, 2008What our legislators put stock in -- literallyState Sen. Ralph Smith, R-Botetourt, is a miserly fellow, he’s never been ashamed to say. The businessman's tight with his money. That's one reason why he's got so much of it. So, it was no big surprise for me to learn that his stock portfolio includes stock in discount shopping mecca WalMart valued between $10,001 and $50,000. We regular citizens get to know this stuff because our elected officials have to disclose it, though not in great detail. From local councils up to the state capitol, our elected leaders must file statements of economic disclosure. And while you could request these records yourself from the government, a dandy organization called the Virginia Public Access Project saves you the work and makes it all readily available on its website. This stuff isn't just for our amusement – though it can be amusing, I’ll confess. The reason is so that we work-a-day folks know where our legislators’ financial interests lie. Then we can tell if their legislating is really in the interest of those who elected them, or in the interest of boosting the value of their own portfolios. Continue reading "What our legislators put stock in -- literally" » February 13, 2008Tuesday's primary: Who won in your neighborhood?CNN told you who the winners were almost before the polls even closed yesterday. Sure, Obama one big in all three Potomac Primaries, and McCain continued his roll, too. And The Roanoke Times tells you who won in each locality around here. This year, we even offered an analysis blog from my boss, Senior Editor Dwayne Yancey. But if that doesn't satisfy your curiousity, you can drill down even deeper into the still unofficial results on the website of the Virginia State Board of Elections. So, for example, I can go to the precinct level data for Roanoke Democrats and tell that in my Raleigh Court precinct, Hillary Clinton got 133 votes to Barack Obama's 100. (I wonder if Bill Clinton's presence in the neighborhood on Monday had anything to do with it?) On the Republican side, I can tell that Mike Huckabee trounced John McCain, 84-34 in my neck of the woods. It'll take you a few clicks to get to this level on your own. You can start with the state-wide numbers, go to the locality, and then, in the column off to the left, click for precincts to get as local as you can get. Be nosy about your neighbors, or scan every precinct to see who ran well where. So go forth, my friends, and drill down into the depths of the sausage-making operation we call democracy. February 6, 2008Another view of legislative gifts: a bubble graphI hope you're finding the database of gifts to Virginia lawmakers informative, or at least fun. One problem, though, is it doesn't do the math for you. You can't instantly see, for example, who received the most in gifts, or the least. So I've added a summary graphic to the site called a bubble graph. The graph is a collection of circles of varying sizes, each representing a lawmaker. The bigger the circle, the higher the total value of gifts the lawmaker received. Click on a circle to get the full name and amount for that lawmaker. Now, hold down the control key and click on several bubbles. In the lower right corner, you'll see it add the totals together for you and give you a percentage of the whole. So, for example, you can quickly determine that the top seven of 117 lawmakers who accepted gifts account for nearly 25 percent of the value of all the gifts received by everyone combined. Look for me to begin offering more of these kinds of graphs to compliment the databases we put up. They give you a different way to interact with the data, get it to speak to you in a different way, and also allow me a way to mine the data and show you the results in a friendly format. You can also generate these kinds of things yourself with your own data using the same web-based utilities I use, like Swivel and Many Eyes. These are free, though you have to register. They were a curious discovery to me. They give you tools, but they are essentially social networking sites (not too different from facebook or myspace). What you network over is the data you share. You know, I've always denied being a geek, but the longer I do this job, the less plausible my deniability seems to be. Maybe I should graph that. February 5, 2008Did your delegate get NASCAR tickets, or just lunch?Last year 117 members of the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate accepted $263,227.10 in gifts from 195 different givers, from ExxonMobil and the Virginia state AFl-CIO to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and a host of so-called "payday lenders." See the gifts your legislator accepted now in the DataSphere. Everyone has their opinion, but from a news reporter like me, there's not a lot here that's really gross, but there's stuff that'll raise your eyebrows. And if nothing else, this list of 725 gifts provides an intriguing look into part of the way government works. Continue reading "Did your delegate get NASCAR tickets, or just lunch?" » |
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