Knox County Election Commission a Pioneer in Open Government

The Knox County Election Commission does a great job of making candidate information public. They use a Facebook page to make citizens quickly aware of all kinds of candidate information that you'd normally have to hope reporters would find. Of course, you can always go down to a county election commission, ask for the information, and try to fish out the change for the copies. But in Knox County, you know who's running for office within minutes of a candidate designating a treasurer. You also get easy access to financial disclosures. I hope the other county election commissions around the state will find similar ways of making this information easy to find.

Open records changes

The state is about to make an historic change to the open records law after a process of reaching consensus. Here's how the City Paper describes the essence of Sen. Randy McNally's (R-Oak Ridge) bill: "The open records bill requires all records open to the public to be made available within five days. If the requested record were closed, the governmental agency would have to give the citizen an explanation on why the record is not public. Or, if it’s going to take longer than five days to fulfill the request, the governmental agency must tell the citizen how long it’s expected to take."

Here's the full story: http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/news.php?viewStory=59359

Openness riddled with secrecy in TN

The Tennessean complains (kind of) about the exceptions to the 1957 open records law in Tennessee. http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080330/NEWS02/80330013/-1/RSS05 .

After crowing about the 250 exemptions, we learn that Florida has 1000 exemptions and one commentator says it should be the model because all of Florida's exceptions are "microscopically narrow."