On Friday afternoon, the City committed to produce electronic election results for all to see. In her interview with Mike Dunn of KYW, City Solicitor Shelley Smith already said they were going to do this, but, it sure is nice to see it in writing:

The City is currently developing a system to allow the public access to a hosted website where election results will be provided. The plan for the next election in November is to provide near real time summary results and the ability to drill down into election details (ward-by-ward, division-by-division, etc) on this hosted website. Polling data and returns should be updated approximately every 10 to 15 minutes as the returns are verified by the City Commissioners. Furthermore, there will be a link on both the City of Philadelphia's main homepage and the City Commissioner's homepage directing interested users to this hosted website.

And, those treasured passwords will become largely useless for the average person, and will now be strictly restricted:

The system for which you request access to is only equipped to handle 150-200 users at one time. Going forward, access will be strictly limited to employees of the City Commissioners and the personnel from the Department of State. These employees will use the internal system to provide needed returns and data to both the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the new hosted site (explained in detail below). No passwords for this internal system will be provided to anyone outside of this group.

That makes sense, especially from a security perspective.

So, given what they have committed to doing, and the new role passwords will have, the City has en masse denied all the requests for passwords. If you want to appeal, instructions are in the letter. My unsolicited advice though, is to let it be, because this is clearly happening. Yes, there is always a chance something could get screwed up. But, I feel pretty confident that this will all happen. (Next push from an interested party who wants to make a difference: Historical results.)

There are some people in this whole thing who have been really helpful. First, thanks to Jim Kenney, the only Councilperson to quickly respond when this whole saga began, for his help behind the scenes. Having the Mayor jump in was A-OK, too. And, Shelley Smith, the City Solicitor, came out on the side of open government, and forced the hand of the Commissioners, by granting my original appeal. They could have made this harder on us than they did. So, to our friends in the City Solicitor’s Office, sorry for being collective pains in the ass. I wish I could say this is the last you will have to deal with us. But, somehow, I doubt it.

And, of course, a lot of credit for this has to go to Ed Goppelt of Hallwatch. Ed was opening up Philly government before it was cool.

But, most of all, to the 400 or so people who requested passwords, pat yourselves on the back. Publishing election returns will not end poverty in Philadelphia. It will not fix the schools. Hey, for that matter, it won’t bring our troops home from Iraq, either. But it is a basic function of government that should be provided, yet hasn’t been. By November, it appears that will change.

Mike Nutter is Spartacus! Or, Shelley Smith is... Oh forget it.

Anyway, this is pretty cool:

Mayor Nutter is now supporting a Penn Law student's effort to get voting results available to everyone on election night, and he wants changes in place by the November election.

.....

But the city commissioners' office, which oversees elections, says altering their system would present tremendous technical hurdles. Staffers there say exporting data to a web page would require periodic system shutdowns during election night, impeding the tally.

Now, though, city solicitor Shelley Smith says Mayor Nutter wants the voting returns opened up to all, preferably by November:

"The Mayor is committed to making this happen, and to offering the city's resources to find a solution to the problem. And the mayor's goal is to have this done by election day. So its our hope that we can get it done."

So, uh, that will work.

As I said, behind the scenes, my sense was that the Law Department was on our side- and that the City Solicitor helped this all happen by granting my appeal. There is also a City Councilperson or two who have been working on or behalf, as well. All of that stuff will come out later.

But...

The reason why this looks like it will be successful is that 1)this was such a basic issue, and... 2) that 375 people forced the hands of the City. When we sent out the request for people to send faxes, I figured 40 to 50 responses would be enough to make a difference. We passed 50 people within about 40 minutes. And so, you gave them no choice.

Cool.

I'm Ed Goppelt!

You are Ed Goppelt. And so are you. And you. And you, too.

What am I talking about? Well, we heard from the Solicitor’s Office on Friday about the election returns issue. Specifically, they sent a letter to Ed- creator of Hallwatch and owner of the faxbank we all used. The letter said that because all the requests came from one fax machine, the Law Department was treating them as one request…

The City received at least 250 identical requests, all of which originated from your fax machine, and as such, we are treating them as one request for the purposes of our response to you.

Upon first read, I was pretty disappointed about that. Except after thinking about it for a few minutes (and especially the part that says... "for the purposes of responding..."), the rest of the letter makes clear that they are still dealing with the main problem:

…in light of the myriad of technological and security issues your request raises, the Law Department must review the request under the Pennsylvania Right to Know Act…

In other words, they are dealing with the underlying issue: that more people have requested passwords than the Commissioners' system appears ready to deal with, and so they need thirty days to come up with an answer. That is fair, and as I told them, the goal was not to force a lot of work on the Law Department, but to open election returns to everyone. In other words, I am not too upset about City lawyers not spending their time on mail merges, as long as they are actually considering the real issue.

(And, not to get too much into palace intrigue here, but much of this was made possible by the fact that City Solicitor Shelley Smith granted my appeal, overruling the Commissioners when they said they would not give me a password. Thus far, the Law Department itself has come down on the side of open government. That is a good sign, in general.)

In terms of whether I think we will get a 'win'... As Sean noted, the Philly Election site is in fact down at the moment. I am not sure if that is a coincidence, but I do know that with 350+ individual requests, people in City Hall have started to work behind the scenes to fix this.

I am cautiously optimistic that the next letter Ed (however many Ed’s there really are) gets will say that his request has been made moot, because the data is now freely available to all citizens on the City of Philadelphia website.