Making public
information public

By Stephen O’Toole
For the Times

While city residents remain stranded on a deserted island amidst a sea of free election results data available in all of the surrounding suburban counties, a Philadelphia law student may finally have sent up the distress signal that rescues Philadelphia.
Unlike their suburban counterparts, Philadelphia residents cannot log onto the city’s municipal Web site to view the results of local elections.
"It’s just so ironic that people don’t have access to the information they helped create by voting," said Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg.
And the city’s excuses for keeping voters in the dark, he says, are balderdash.
Ackelsberg, a Fairmount resident, is a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania who started Young Philly Politics (youngphillypolitics.com), a progressive political blog, more than three years ago.
Following the recent primary election, his interest in politics led him to start an ongoing letter-writing campaign aimed at making city election results available via the Internet — a practice that is common for Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties. The letters are actually password requests to the City Commissioners Office, which oversees city election results. The office has cited technological limitations with its computer system and limits the number of potential users to 150 by issuing that amount of passwords.
Ackelsberg was initially denied a password by the commissioners, but an appeal to the city solicitor ultimately got him a password, which he considered a hollow victory.
"The goal is not to get everyone a password," Ackelsberg said. "The goal is to make the information accessible to the public."
Bolstered by that small victory, Ackelsberg decided to push the matter by using his Web site and the Hallwatch public information Web site (hallwatch.org) to prod more people to submit official requests for access to election results.
As the Times went to press, 384 people had submitted letters, according to statistics maintained on the Hallwatch Web site.
Edmund Goppelt runs Hallwatch, which is an information clearinghouse for various public data, such as property records, pending legislation status, campaign finance reports and voting records.
Goppelt first tried to push for easier access to election data in 2003, but that effort died when city commissioners failed to act and public support at the time was insufficient. This time, Goppelt is more optimistic that change is on the horizon.
"More people are technologically savvy now, and there is more interest in open government and having access to this type of information," Goppelt said.
Goppelt said reasons for the lack of public access to election results have fallen far short of adequate.
"We’ve been told it’s too hard, which suggests that our counterparts in the suburbs are brighter and more efficient than us, but that’s not true," Goppelt said.
City commissioners have said their computer system would be unable to handle more than 150 users on the system at one time.
Ackelsberg said the problem would be simple to solve by exporting the data from the main system to a separate data bank, which would allow better access for the general public.
Currently, logging on with a password essentially means the user is linked to the main computer system of the commissioners office, he said.
A list of the 150 password holders obtained by Ackelsberg via a Freedom of Information Act request showed mostly local politicians and the politically connected, with some politicians, such as state Sen. Vince Fumo, having as many as 10 passwords
"It’s kind of chilling that access to public information is limited to politicians and insiders," Ackelsberg said.
City officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Ackelsberg and Goppelt recently received a response from the city solicitor’s office regarding the first 250 letters submitted via Hallwatch. The letter cited a "myriad of technical and security issues" raised by the requests, and said the city’s law department would review the matter as it relates to the Pennsylvania Right to Know Act.
The letter promised a complete response in no more than 30 days.
Meanwhile, Ackelsberg and Goppelt remain hopeful despite the roadblocks that have been put up along the way.
"Unless there’s some amazing circumstance, ordinary citizens should have the same access to information as politicians and the politically connected, especially with something so basic as election returns," Ackelsberg said.
"It would be unconscionable to fight this," Ackelsberg added.
"I hope the city does the right thing," Goppelt said. ••