Transparency News 11/25/15

State and Local Stories

A Nelson County Sheriff's Office investigator who ran for sheriff this year was indicted Tuesday on a felony charge of election fraud, according to the Charlottesville Commonwealth's Attorney's Office. The charge against William "Billy" Mays Jr. stems from a private citizen in late September questioning whether Mays, who lost the November election to David Hill, falsely stated he lived in Nelson County, according to a news release from the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office.
Nelson County Times


National Stories
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Can FOIA be funny? Curtis Raye thinks so. He has created a comedy show celebrating the quirky, off-the-wall records he and others have found through the Freedom of Information Act. Raye, a writer and former improv teacher, says he created “FOIA Love: A Comedy Show About Public Records” after spending nearly a year working as a field organizer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He has performed the show in New York and Philadelphia and plans to make his Washington D.C. debut on Dec. 14. I interviewed Raye by email to find out more about the show, how he finds the records and whether he includes any of Clinton’s emails in his act.
Poynter

The freelance journalist whose lawsuit forced the Chicago Police Department to release video of a fatal police shooting of a black teenager says he was barred from attending a news conference with the mayor and police superintendent on Tuesday. Dozens of journalists were gathered inside Chicago’s Police Headquarters on Tuesday, listening to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy discuss the shooting of the teenager, Laquan McDonald, 17. Absent was Brandon Smith, the freelance journalist whose lawsuit over the summer had pressed for the release of the police dashboard camera video. In a telephone interview, Mr. Smith said that he had rushed to the news conference after hearing about it from friends, but that police officers guarding the door had blocked him from entering. He said they had told him the room was too full to allow members of the news media without credentials.
New York Times

The U.S. government can keep secret various memos related to its legal justification for using drones to kill citizens suspected of terrorism overseas, a federal appeals court said in a decision unsealed Monday. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reached its decision in a second round of Freedom of Information Act requests by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times after an earlier request had succeeded in forcing the government to disclose a redacted version of a 2010 41-page legal opinion prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department describing for the Defense Department the legality of targeted drone attacks. The appeals court said then that prior public disclosures by senior government officials including President Obama necessitated the document's release. The Oct. 22 decision by the 2nd Circuit to keep eight memos secret largely upheld an Oct. 31, 2014, ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan. It remained sealed for a month to provide time for appeal.
Military Times

The U.S. Air Force is looking into how classified data about a competition for a next-generation U.S. bomber found its way into a report published by Forbes magazine, according to several sources familiar with the issue. The level of detail included in the column raised concerns given the classified nature of the bomber program, according to three of the sources. Thompson said he was aware that his report had caused concerns, but did not know of any specific investigation that had been launched into how he obtained the information. The Air Force declined comment on whether it was investigating the possible disclosure of classified information in the magazine report.
Reuters

Editorials/Columns

Brian Davison, a parent in Loudoun County, may be a bit of a gadfly. But he's on point with his insistence that parents have more information about the performance of their public schools. He filed dozens of requests under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act seeking access to data collected as part of the commonwealth's Standards of Learning testing program. His efforts rebuffed, Mr. Davison availed himself of the courts, filing suit for the records. The specific information he sought is student-growth percentiles, a measure the Virginia Department of Education began collecting in 2011. It helps demonstrate "the progress a student has made relative to the progress of students whose achievement was similar on previous assessments," according to the DOE. Though some in the education establishment believe the SGP data to be unreliable and a poor quantitative measure, it can be used to compile class-by-class scores that help determine the relative effectiveness of individual teachers. Responding to Mr. Davison's suit, members of the Loudoun County School Board argued that the data would be misinterpreted if it was released, basically arguing that we citizens are too stupid to understand the numbers. A spokeswoman from the National Council on Teacher Quality told the Washington Post that releasing the information would be an invasion of privacy, even though these are public employees receiving taxpayer-funded salaries. And, naturally, the Virginia Education Association, what amounts to a teachers union in this right-to-work state, strenuously objected to singling out under-performing teachers, though schools routinely do the same of students and everyone does the same of schools.
Daily Press

Despite shockingly low turnout across the state, The Pilot’s Patrick Wilson reported, November’s election was marred by confusion about those voter ID rules, problems with absentee ballots and voting machines that flipped votes. Even Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s vote was delayed by a worker who mistakenly questioned the governor’s address. And that was an election in which few Virginians voted because the majority of seats were functionally uncontested. Turnout in November, according to the Department of Elections, was 1,509,864, or just 29.1 percent of Virginia’s 5,196,436 registered voters. The General Assembly has repeatedly rejected calls for more spending on voting machines, even after huge lines appeared in Hampton Roads precincts in 2008 and 2012. Its members have similarly refused to expand absentee voting, or to even consider voting by mail or any number of cheap innovations that other states have embraced to increase participation, and which would reduce problems at polling precincts. Coupled with the new voter ID laws and the wholesale protection of incumbents, it’s clear that the goal in Richmond now is to make voting in Virginia harder, not easier, and to make it matter less. Mission accomplished.
Virginian-Pilot