|
It’s not uncommon for one metropolitan area to be home to dozens of local governments. In lots of those places, mayors and other local officials often lament the difficulties of having to coordinate with so many cities, towns and counties. There’s no agreed-upon definition for this local government “fragmentation,” but most researchers measure it by the number of governments per capita. We used that measurement, along with the number of governments per square mile, to see which metro areas and counties are the most fragmented. Our calculations are based on the latest Census of Governments survey, which is conducted every five years and counted 38,779 cities, counties, towns and other general-purpose local governments (excluding special districts).
Governing
A pair of proposed changes to D.C.’s Freedom of Information law is drawing opposition from open-government advocates, who say they could potentially make it tougher for the press and public to request and obtain government emails and other documents. One proposed change says that anyone requesting information under FOIA should “reasonably describe” what they are looking for. Council officials say the purpose of the proposed changes is in part to tamp down on overly broad FOIA requests that can produce tens of thousands of documents that government staffers then have to review to ensure they do not include information that can legally be redacted or kept from public disclosure. But open-government advocates are sounding an alarm over both the purpose of the proposed changes and the way they have been dropped into a budget bill, instead of introduced as a stand-alone measure that would get a public hearing.
WAMU
The Justice Department released a second copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Monday evening, following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by BuzzFeed and the Electronic Privacy and Information Center. The lightly-redacted version of Mueller’s report appears to be identical to the 448-page document that was released in April, except it sheds more light on the redactions by explaining why the blacked-out information is exempted from release under FOIA.
The Washington Examiner
The FBI on Monday released more than 500 pages of heavily redacted tips from the public surrounding the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year. The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by BuzzFeed News reporter Jason Leopold. A vast majority of the documents were redacted under FOIA regulations. The tips that were included were largely comprised of messages either supporting or opposing Kavanaugh’s rocky nomination process. Notes written by FBI agents about the unredacted tips showed that the agency considered many of them to be either personal opinions or not presenting a legitimate threat.
The Hill
From checking in at a polling place on a tablet to registering to vote by smartphone to using an electronic voting machine to cast a ballot, computers have become an increasingly common part of voting in America. But the underlying technology behind some of those processes is often a black box. Private companies, not state or local governments, develop and maintain most of the software and hardware that keep democracy chugging along. That has kept journalists, academics and even lawmakers from speaking with certainty about election security. In an effort to improve confidence in elections, Microsoft announced Monday that it is releasing an open-source software development kit called ElectionGuard that will use encryption techniques to let voters know when their vote is counted. It will also allow election officials and third parties to verify election results to make sure there was no interference with the results.
NPR
|
 “Private companies, not state or local governments, develop and maintain most of the software and hardware that keep democracy chugging along.”
|
“FOIA would look at communications among staff and decide, based on content, whether they had to be released.”