2008 Public Records Audit

Citizen bloggers crusade for government transparency

By Evan Hall

John Washburn grew disillusioned with government competence after voting discrepancies marred the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and his wife was sick of listening to him complain.

“I essentially started my blog as a place to vent my feelings,” said Washburn, a Germantown native who moonlights as a citizen activist and blogger.

Washburn first grew interested in public records and election integrity in 1992 when he used his experience as a software tester to help research the book “Votescam: The Stealing of America,” and later as he audited the 2004 election.

“The sole goal in keeping records from the public is to fatigue them into compliance and to fatigue them to stop watching [the government],” Washburn said. “Open records laws are one of the tools to fight that.”

In its infancy, political blogging was concerned primarily with fact-checking the mainstream media, generating little original content or breaking stories.

However, the Internet has empowered a growing cadre of citizen bloggers in Wisconsin and throughout the nation to take matters into their own hands, sharing open records information and collaborating to bring greater transparency to government.

In the vein of Wisconsin’s long progressive tradition, open citizen bloggers are playing a unique role in shedding light on public records and government accountability.

In recent years, open government blogging has blossomed across the nation as part of a larger movement away from the traditional media watchdog role — a role that independent citizens have increasingly come to inhabit.

“It’ll be a growing role, because the economics are that many media organizations don’t have the resources to go for the open records and the litigation that it might entail,” Washburn said. “That leaves it to people with an essentially abnormal interest in a particular topic to do it on their own.”

Washburn’s first foray into open records requests was auditing elections in southeastern Wisconsin during the November 2004 election. Washburn fought to obtain voting records from Milwaukee, where Washburn noted rampant voting irregularities.

“Simple numbers didn’t line up, like the number of ballots handed out to electors as documented on the poll books did not match the number of ballots cast into the machine as printed out on the scanners,” Washburn said. Washburn sued for the Milwaukee election records and won.

In the wake of the 2004 election, Washburn helped craft open records requests with the Florida Fair Elections Coalition in order to document and test the voting systems’ software.

Most recently, Washburn made headlines when he confronted Texas Governor Rick Perry over his policy of deleting emails after seven days. Despite being repeatedly rebuffed by the Governor’s office, Washburn refused to back down until he obtained emails through open records requests.

For his efforts, Washburn won the 2008 James Madison Award from the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, recognizing work to defend the First Amendment and open government.

With newspaper readership and revenue waning, bloggers like Washburn are increasingly serving a function once reserved for investigative reporters. The growing dearth of probing investigative journalism is prompting bloggers to take up its mantle, stepping on toes where journalists can no longer afford to tread.

At the national level, a number of citizen bloggers are also drawing attention to violations of state sunshine laws and national government accountability.

One example is Charles Davis, a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, who maintains the National Freedom of Information Coalition blog. Davis started as a newspaper reporter and today does investigative research on homeland security and other federal and state agencies.

Leslie Graves, president of the Lucy Burns Institute in Spring Green, says this evolution of the blogosphere has empowered citizen whistleblowers to break stories on blogs using open records.
Graves started blogging in 2007 and runs the Lucy Burns Institute, a nonprofit that provides resources for citizens looking into open records.

“We wanted to provide some information about using open records in language and with a focus that ordinary people can relate to,” Graves said. “We also wanted to talk to those people, ordinary people who aren’t journalists, who filed open records requests.”

Like Washburn, disenchantment with government ethics sparked Graves’ interest in government transparency.

“I was in college during Watergate; the efforts then at federal government secrecy struck me as part-and-parcel of why so many people harbor a deep-seated distrust of the government,” Graves said.

After working as a stay-at-home mom for years, Graves emerged as a political activist in 2006.
The wave of investigative journalism Watergate triggered had long since crested, and Graves felt that citizens needed to assume its dedication to exposing government waste, fraud and abuse.

Graves aided in filing open records requests inquiring into public employee electioneering on ballot initiatives in seven states. Only one state complied, and two municipal employees were implicated and fined for electioneering as a result. Graves said she felt frustrated by how difficult it was for ordinary people to obtain copies of public documents given that government corruption was so clearly tainting election integrity.

“This experience inspired an interest in trying to figure out a way to make open records laws more accessible to ordinary citizens who want to use them,” Graves said.

Today Graves contributes to a number of sister blogs and wikis including State Sunshine and Open Records as well as WikiFOIA, which her daughter Sarah helped her build.

“One of the things we’d like to help happen in however small a way is to encourage people who want to share more information about their local school government or city government or county government to use blogging to do that,” Graves said. “A lot of the stories that cover local units of government aren’t necessarily big enough stories to be in the local daily newspaper, but they are big stories for that community.”

Early on, Grave’s Open Records blog posted one or two stories a month about court rulings and state FOIA requests. However, 18 months later Graves said the inquiries and reports of requests for open records are flooding in from mainstream journalists, opposition political researchers and regular people.

“Many, many government agencies do not produce the documents that people are asking for, and they ought to be able to produce those documents,” Graves said.

One major project Graves undertook with her WikiFOIA blog was the Sunshine Blogger Project, which surveyed government transparency in all 50 states. Graves asked fellow citizen bloggers to request email records from mayors and catalogued the results online.

Bloggers found widely varying compliance from state to state, but often faced stiff resistance that in several instances culminated in lawsuits. Wisconsin’s own Gov. Jim Doyle refused to produce email records after a lengthy correspondence with a persistent blogger. In Missouri, Gov. Matt Blunt’s policy of destroying and withholding emails led to an investigation by the attorney general and the firing of Blunt’s chief of staff and top attorney. Last October, Blunt agreed to provide free copies of his old emails after succumbing to intense media pressure.

Likewise Washburn, who took part in the Sunshine Blogger Project, similarly brought Gov. Perry under fire for deleting week-old emails. While Washburn acknowledges the value of digging up and revealing scandal or corruption, he said the value of citizen bloggers pursuing open records and government lies more in its potential to change attitudes.

“It’s not what you get so much from the records, it’s what you become by actually seeking them out,” Washburn said. “You’re taking a small step to be a sovereign citizen, and essentially reigning in the government that acts in your name.”