Bills S999 and H6312, sponsored by Senator Cynthia Coyne (District 32) and Representative Kathleen Fogarty (District 35), gives the Secretary of State the power to purchase new voting equipment, a duty that was formerly carried out by the Board of Elections.

“Back in 1997, when the last purchasing bill was done, it was set up so that it would revert over to the Board of Elections,” Secretary Gorbea explained. “So, for the last 17 years that’s where it had rested, and the legislature, in this past session, saw fit to turn that around. Now, of course, the Board of Elections is an instrumental part of this, and is working with us on this process.”

She added that voting equipment is part of a democracy’s infrastructure, and that citizens in a democracy depend on that equipment to “deliver fair, fast, and accurate elections.”

Gorbea has ordered the creation of a Voting Equipment Task Force, to inform the Department of State’s process of researching and buying new equipment, which has not been updated since 1997. John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, is a member of the task force, said the Board of Elections was not moving into the 21^st century fast enough when it came to voting infrastructure, so the new legislation is a good way to move forward, even though it may be less transparent.

“The Board of Elections process could have been more transparent, because in the end the Board would have to vote in a public session on the purchase of the new machines, and now the Secretary can make the decision. The Secretary is not a board that has to have a public session,” he said. “But, fortunately, the Secretary convened a task force, to give input, and it’s a very expansive task force that brings in a lot of different people in the community. So, I think she is being as transparent as she can be, given the circumstances.”

Marion also said that the task force will be looking at what other states have done to influence how they will go about acquiring new equipment. Common Cause as a whole, he said, is also interested in making voting more accessible to Rhode Islanders. Senator Coyne shared that sentiment.

“The signing of this legislation is crucial to not only ensuring our elections are fair and accurate, but also to bringing the state’s voting machines into the 21^st century,” she said. “In addition, modern equipment will make the voting process easier for Rhode Islanders, which will hopefully result in more people becoming involved in the democratic process.”

Governor Raimondo added that the main goal is to ensure that government works for everybody.

“This is a bill that I supported. I think the Secretary of State will do a good job. It will be efficient, and as I mentioned in my comments, really performance based. We want to make government effective and efficient, and the best use of tax dollars, and I think this does that,” she said.

An interesting side note about this bill that was mentioned at the signing is the fact that all the main stakeholders in its passage are women. Representative Fogarty, of South Kingstown, said that this proves that women create good legislation, which leads to good government.

“It was not something that was planned,” Gorbea said on the subject. “It was just something that happened organically, and I was pleased to see it happen.”

But this is the 21st century.

In the 21st century, people don’t want to wait around in the cold for a bus, because they don’t have to. They have the internet, which can tell them, based on real-time location data, exactly when their bus is going to arrive. Or, maybe they live in an urban area that values its transit system enough to provide frequent enough service such that, even if you miss one bus, the next one will be along before your toes fall off from frostbite.

Unfortunately, neither of those things are true in Rhode Island.

Google Maps and other transit apps are still waiting for RIPTA to provide them with real-time data, instead of relying on scheduled bus arrival times. When you’re standing out at a stop in the cold, and you have a meeting you need to get to, what do you do with the statistic that a majority of buses arrive at each stop within 5 minutes of their scheduled time? Do you wait to see if the bus will come? Or do you walk over to the next transit corridor to maybe catch that bus? Or, more likely, you just don’t rely on the bus, because you don’t know whether it can get you there. When you can’t rely on the bus, it’s not a good alternative to car ownership for most people.

Or wait! Even if there’s some major technological, bureaucratic, budgetary, or other reason RIPTA can’t set up a process to format its data in the necessary fashion and provide a feed for Google and other apps (or even *gasp* citizen developers!) it doesn’t matter, right? There are a lot of bus lines; people can rely on the schedule and function pretty okay, yeah?

Except the problem is, RIPTA’s bus service is on the low end of frequency. Transit expert Jarrett Walker categorizes transit service based on off-peak frequency into four categories: buses every 15 minutes or less, every 30 minutes or less, every 60 minutes or less, and occasional service. If you miss those most frequent buses, no worries, because another will be along soon. If you miss the less frequent ones, you know the drill. Walk home, and tell that fantastic job or client you were really excited about that you won’t be able to make it.

So here’s a map of Providence with RIPTA routes colored according to frequency. Red is the best, then blue, then green, then orange is practically nonexistent service.

But look! There are lots of red lines there! Except if you notice, those red lines are mostly along limited-access highways, without much in the way of transit access to the people living next to them. I could count on one hand the corridors outside of downtown with actual frequent transit access:

1. North Main (paragon of pedestrian friendliness that THAT is)
2. West Broadway
3. Cranston Street
4. Broad
5. Elmwood
6. Waterman/Angell
7. Eddy (only to Thurbers)

Okay I borrowed two fingers from the other hand. But THAT’S IT. No frequent service to RIC or PC. No frequent service to the Wards of City Council members Narducci, Ryan, Correia, Igliozzi, Hassett, or Matos, and hardly any to Councilman Zurier’s Ward 2 or Council President Aponte’s Ward 10. And really, the frequent coverage ain’t great in many other Wards; they just have one or two frequent lines running through them.

Ideally RIPTA would solve both of these problems, but of course there are budgetary constraints and an imperative to cover the whole service area with service. As Walker states in this awesome video (yes I’m a geek), there is a tension between the goal of coverage and the goal of frequency. And indeed, with the R-line and suggestions of further focus on the highest-potential routes, RIPTA is headed more in the direction of frequency than it has been historically.

But the other problem? C’mon RIPTA. We’re living in the 21st century. Get on it. Or tell us why you’re failing in this way. Do you think we don’t care? Or that you’ll look bad? We do care. You already look bad when you don’t tell us why you’re deficient in this area. Here are some links to help get you there if you’re not already on your way: GTFS-realtime. MBTA’s live-feed page. Transit Camp 2015 conference notes.

Outside a hot live music spot in Wilmington, NC, I excitedly talked to friends about getting folks to call their state senators and demand electronic filing of campaign finance reports. “I’d rather stick a fork in my eye,” one of my new friends said laughing. And there it was, the reality of things, the nitty gritty of campaign finance reform seemed excruciatingly dull to them.

Vice President Biden recently spoke about this conundrum associated with another important topic, voter suppression, during his appearance at Netroots Nation 2014. “…the most precious right Americans possess is the unfettered access to the ballot box…it is not as sexy, it is not as immediately heart-wrenching…,” Biden proclaimed. But for those of us who see the importance of such reforms, the question is: How can we make it a bit more sexy and heart-wrenching?

The Short Game

Don’t bet on simple transparency narratives alone doing anything meaningful. My inbox is flooded with fundraising emails touting the Koch Brothers influence on the political process – it may triple donations but seems to do little else. Let’s do more to connect the dots between contributions and legislative action/inaction. Short attention spans require accurate and quick but deeper narratives that may spark further interest and engagement. Supporting the development of phone apps that do this is a critical next step to making things more visually attractive and understandable. A great app that has many of these features is Open States. Download it!

Rhode Island is ahead of the curve on assuring candidates and committees file their campaign data electronically, but there are many states that are still flooding their election boards with paper reports. If you’re in one of those states (e.g. North Carolina), make sure campaigns are required to file data electronically. It’s the only way that our future apps will be able to quickly crunch the numbers.

The Long Game

The fluid challenges facing mainstream newspapers threatens the future of investigative journalism, the kind that gets your heart throbbing in the face of corruption and abuse of power. The apps above might be useful, but we will always need a vibrant journalistic community to inspire us to use those apps! Let’s vote with our dollar and invest in solid journalism.

Lastly, let’s not forget that any reform rests on an educated and engaged citizenry. One of my favorite quotes from President Jefferson addresses this:

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power” (1820).

If your favored candidate for any office this fall doesn’t have a well-articulated position on assuring an enlightened society, they’re no good. Some of us learn about political engagement in home, most of us learn about it in school. The long game requires an inspiring and thorough education in civics and history.

The Last Step

This last step completes a formula for making campaign finance reform a bit more sexy: Hold elected officials accountable with your vote. Make sure every candidate you ever vote for has a well-articulated education plan and a specific position on a robust civics program.

And finally support Senator Whitehouse’s DISCLOSE Act. It’s common sense legislation from the great state of Rhode Island.

Step One is relatively easy: we turn the NSA’s Utah Data Center into the world’s next Great Library.

I’m not kidding.

The forces that labor for our security are not composed of evil people, but yet they can not prevent themselves from sitting far outside the functions of our democracy. They have lied to Congress, and lied repeatedly to the American people and especially the people of the world. When their efforts to maintain security are successful, their work is a victim of its own success. They lament this problem, but they do not put in any real effort to democratize their role in society. Since whatever they do is never brought to public debate except through high-profile leaks, we are forced to assume that what they are doing is evil.

And in fact, what they are doing is evil. It is evil not because of the character of its creators, but instead because these behaviors poison the well of democracy itself. It smothers a free people to be watched and listened to. Even when it is not us that is under surveillance, it destroys our credibility to have such immeasurable power over others. Much like the atom bomb before it, the imbalance of power that we Americans have in the world makes us the defacto police state. We fiddle with a sword of Damocles, dangling it over the whole world, both free and otherwise. In doing so, we are inviting our neighbors to participate in their own arms race, goading them into gobbling up our communication and dangling a sword of their own over us.

We’ve moved into very dark territory with technology, as dark as unlocking the atom ever was. So what can we do about it?

The answer is simple. We harness this immense monster we unlocked for a public good. We can set a gold standard for civilization and retool a few of these weapons and hammer them back into plowshares. We can take a $1.5 billion data center, and use it to store the best of what the world has to offer, rather than the worst. What to do with it? I don’t know. Only a public discussion of what we can do with a yottabyte of storage could yield a decent answer. Surely we could use it for advanced research, or as an auxiliary to the Library of Congress.

But what we must not do, is let that facility sit there in Utah and store the communications of our neighbors. That is a disgusting and inhuman act, regardless of its motivations. There is a point at which we have to learn to behave as decent people if we are to pretend to have any moral authority in this world.

So if anyone wants to start a campaign to make that facility the next Great Library, I’d be happy to start it with you.