Thursday, February 23, 2006
Seems to be a secret
I've been doing some research on some legislation that effects school budgets. (A blog for another day ;-) )The NJ State Legislature has a wonderful site for looking up info on representatives and info on bills and laws .... however I couldn't find one key piece of information ... voting records. How did my elected representatives vote on the law I am researching?? I mean, I'm pretty good at hunting down info on the web but I was stumped as to where the info was. As a last resort I sent email to an "info" address I found on the website. To their credit they did get back to me fairly quickly, within a day. The Voting record info is buried in the "downloads" section of the site and it's in a zip file in comma delimited format. No biggie for me I just pulled it into MS Excel and grubbed out the info I needed but for someone less computer literate this may have been a stretch.
I wouldn't be making a big deal of this if it wasn't for the fact that the rest of the website is so good. District maps, bio's, search for a bill by number, content, sponsor, a complete NJ Statutes database. It just seems almost intentionally hard to find.
#posted by Rob Roschewsk @ 8:18 AM
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Two suggestions on tracking your representatives' voting records: MegaVote at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/megavote/ and Vote Smart at http://vote-smart.org (though state representative voting records may not yet be in place, there's hope for that to be added)
Thursday, February 09, 2006
I just watch it for the ads .....
#posted by Rob Roschewsk @ 7:56 AM
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Comments:
I thought all the commercials were a little weak this year, but my favorite was the Vault Scarecrow. :)