Author: Chris Krenn

November 20, 2022 — One discovery we made in the Maine Senate and House data is that between 2017 and 2022 average voting polarization in the Maine Senate and House has increased from 60% to almost 80%. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, over this period, the percentage of bipartisan votes, where most Democrats and Republicans vote together, decreased from 19% to 10%, and the percentage of polarized votes increased from 32% to 61%. Some, but not necessarily all, of this increase is due to Republican legislators starting to vote more unanimously (like their Democratic colleagues).

Our website (http://dash.democracygps.org) allows visitors to see for themselves which bills were most and least polarizing...

November 19, 2022 — To help Maine voters make their final decisions for the Maine Senate and House of Representatives elections next week, we developed a new website (https://dash.democracygps.org) that allows visitors to easily explore and compare the voting histories of Maine politicians. For example, visitors can compare the voting histories of Nicole Grohoski and Brian Langley, who were both running for the Maine Senate District 7 seat. Grohoski has voted mostly (94% of the time) with her fellow Democrats, but Langley’s voting record is more liberal than many other Maine Republicans, having voted with the Democratic majority 50% of the time.

The website provides a view of all recent Maine Senate and House members that shows how often each politician voted with the Democratic or Republican majorities and a measure of how polarized their voting records were (negative for more agreement with the Democrats and positive for more agreement with the Republicans).

The website also lists some of the most independent or bipartisan votes for each politician, allows visitors to easily search the complete voting histories of current and recent Maine state senators and representatives since 2017, and shows which bills were most polarizing.

I've analyzed initial results from our pol-is survey about the proposed expansion of Piedmont's public safety camera program. A presentation describing this analysis is below.

• This blog: http:/democracygps.org/
• Real-time audience response systems:
  • http://mentimeter.com (1 year free for students; $10-25/mo. afterwards; can't edit imported powerpoint slides)
  • https://www.polleverywhere.com/ (free for audiences < 25; $10/mo. for entry level; is supposed to have better powerpoint and google sheets integration)
• Pol.is:
  • http://github.com/pol-is (source code)
  • democracyCPS <at> democracygps.org (free for CPS students)

We patched a security vulnerability on our wordpress blog that temporarily allowed the title to change to an advertisement for a bailbond service. This vulnerability was very unlikely to have compromised any personal information on the discussion pages, and it did not affect the polling data stored on polis.democracygps.org at all.

We also noticed that polis.democracygps.org was not running. We have restarted the server and are writing an automatic restart script.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

-Chris

The city of Piedmont, CA is in the process of evaluating and considering an expanded public safety camera program and may discuss further at a June City Council meeting. If you are a Piedmont resident, and to help ensure that the City Council understands your views on public safety cameras, please visit polis.democracygps.org/piedmont-camera to vote on a series of statements regarding the public safety camera program. If the existing statements don’t capture your opinions and feelings, you can add one or more new statements that you agree with. A primary goal is to inform the city council as they decide whether to approve new public safety cameras and to help set policy and safeguards in their use. A secondary goal is to develop a more efficient, inclusive and dynamic platform for debate on city issues. Results from this survey will be submitted to the public safety committee before their next scheduled meeting at the end of November. Thank you in advance for your time and for your participation! And, your opinions will be kept confidential. For a broader discussion, please visit democracygps.org/piedmont/piedmont-public-safety-cameras/.