State Senate, Pork, and You: A Pathetic Primer
Rottenchester’s back on the mic at The Fighting 29th, bringing you more tasty nuggets of news and analysis. The latest is a great roundup of the NY State Senate’s desperate attempts to hide their pork “Member Items”. Honestly, they’re like my 5 year old daughter trying to lie her way out of having broken something:
The Albany Times-Union has been trying to get a usable list of member items since June. Their first request went to court and the court ordered release of the items. So both houses released a list with the legislator’s names blacked out. The Times-Union went back to court, which ordered the release of the items with names included. In response, the Senate released a list of items as images in a “locked” PDF. This meant that it was impossible to search the text in the 3,000 page file, and cutting-and-pasting parts of the file was prohibited.
Why should you care? Well, if you give two craps about accountability and open government, and don’t want your state senator to vote against your interests then buy your love, this is kinda important.
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So print it, scan it, and use OCR to convert it into searchable document.
In theory, sounds great. But for 3000 pages? Plus the fact that any of the OCR programs I’ve seen output raw, unformatted text, that are difficult at best to read. Plus the fact that OCR-ing usually requires some fixing up of misinterpreted text on each page. Times that by 3000.
When the Senate could, in 5 minutes, send out a reasonable version.