Ramping up

Over the last several years, I have done the monoblogue Accountability Project. It’s an effort to identify how all 188 state legislators fared on a series of key floor (and, beginning in 2010, committee) votes based on a conservative point of view.

Generally the hardest step in the process, which takes many hours of research, is to determine just which bills are the most important ones to log. I’m going to return to that point later, but I wanted to go through some of the other parameters I’m going to include beginning this year for the second cycle of the mAP:

  1. I’m going to limit the number of votes to 25 each in the House and Senate. It’s not an arbitrary limit, though: since I base my point system on factors besides voting such as absences, skipping votes, or House members changing votes (all these factors can incrementally step down a score) I wanted a number I could easily divide into fourths yet remain a whole number, making the score easier to understand. So 100/25=4 points for each vote.
  2. Ideally, I’d like an even number of committee votes and that will be the hardest part since some committees vote on more important bills than others. I may consider committee votes as bonus points if I can’t rustle up enough votes out of certain committees and use 25 floor votes. I’d like to use between three and five committee votes as part of my 25, with the most likely result being three.
  3. There will definitely be a format change. Instead of grouping by district (1 through 47) I plan on doing the 2011 mAP by county – obviously MoCo will be a huge page while Somerset County would have just two legislators to deal with. But I think this is better for the end user who may not know just what number his or her district is.
  4. I also have to consider the Special Session this fall to deal with redistricting and any votes which come from that before dealing out legislative honors.

This is where you come in. I would love to have your assistance in identifying bills which are near and dear to your heart AND deal with statewide issues (so, for example, I wouldn’t work with our school board election bill since it only affects our county.) All I need is the bill number and I’ll take it from there.

Obviously I already know some of the biggies like the in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, the gay marriage bill, raising the sales tax on alcohol, and the three budget bills (budget, BRFA, and bond bill.) But there are other key bills and amendments I’d like to be able to consider – the hardest part is pruning to 25 votes!

So here is your chance for input on the monoblogue Accountability Project – popular demand will help me prioritize.  Simply leave a comment below or e-mail me – ttownjotes (at) yahoo.com. My goal as always is to have this finished by July 4th.

Borrowing an idea

As many readers know, I’ve done the monoblogue Accountability Project since 2008, covering the entire 2007-10 term of the Maryland General Assembly. It now appears I may have some help, and they’ll have a similar conservative perspective as mine. (Blue Ridge Forum has coverage.)

An offshoot of the recent Maryland CAN conference, Maryland Vote Watch only asks volunteers to watch the voting patterns (in both committee and floor votes) of a small group of General Assembly members – for example, I would keep tabs on the Delegates and Senator from District 38, which is my home district here. Chances are that most issues and votes will be relatively non-controversial, but there are usually about 30 to 50 votes which separate liberals from moderates, and moderates from conservatives.

So I’m happy to help out the cause, which actually may make my job easier later this spring when I compile this year’s edition of the monoblogue Accountability Project. We all should watch our elected officials like a hawk, so I encourage my far-flung readers to adopt their own district or a neighboring one.

Accountability – now available in .pdf

As part of my bid to inform voters, today I took my monoblogue Accountability Project page and converted it into a .pdf file suitable for download and printing.

While the 73-page document is a little rough visually (I scanned a printed version) it’s still legible. And the further advantage is that one can segregate voting by years and have the charts handy – they are behind the legislation descriptions. Now you can see the data I’m using to dissect the voting records of our Three Stooges Conway, Mathias, and Cane.

It can be easily accessed as well – look for the gray box in the upper right corner. I even did a marquee scroll to draw the eye to the spot. Just click on that and the .pdf file loads into a new window. (Changed the site – click here instead. It takes a few moments to load up, but consider the fact this runs 73 pages.)

So for those of you who want opposition research on the foes of conservatism, your wait is over. Tips would be nice, but not mandatory – think of it as a public service on my part and enjoy!