Mass Disaster Sunshine and Foilies

By Maya Shaffer

During Sunshine Week, a week of journalists posting stories highlighting governmental transparency, our reporting from last year won one of The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Foilies for Massachusetts at large and Worcester specifically. The Foilies are awards given each year to some of the worst offenders of the transparency laws across the country and we're glad to see Massachusetts once again get the recognition it so richly deserves.

Massachusetts is in an ongoing transparency disaster. This is the only state in the country where the executive branch, legislative branch, and judiciary are all exempt from state's transparency law. In practice, if a record isn't turned over voluntarily by a government agency, it can take months to years to get it- if you manage to get it at all. 

Crit.news has outstanding records requests and orders from the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office that date back multiple years, so at this point it isn't hyperbole to say that getting records in Massachusetts can be as time consuming a process as Brexit was. One of our long-term outstanding records appeal orders dates back to a request we made 1615 days ago; by comparison Brexit took 1653 days from the referendum to Brexit day… however we do not expect the state will ever take action on the orders in question.

Over the years reporting that I've been a part of has been cited in one another of the Foilies, and an IRE Golden Padlock (an award given to the most secretive government agency in the country). Not related to my reporting, the overseer of the Massachusetts Public Records Law, Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin, was also a finalist for another Golden Padlock. Massachusetts fails on a nationally noticeable level consistently.

Democracy depends on an informed voting public, so Massachusetts is an imperiled democracy because there is no timely access to public records, and increasingly there is simply no access whatsoever to public records. The voting populace cannot be informed about what the government is doing if they have no right or ability to see the government records that detail the actions of the government. Without the ability to see what the government is doing, the public cannot hold the government accountable. We can vote, but we won't know what we are really voting for. 

Maddeningly Galvin, whose office is one of the largest roadblock to transparency in the state, understands the importance of public records access to democracy. In his guide to the records law he begins by explaining the stakes “The founding fathers of our nation strove to develop an open government formed on the principles of democracy and public participation. An informed citizen is better equipped to participate in that process.” Another of the major roadblocks is Attorney General Maura Healey, whose office is supposed to enforce the law but almost never does. She is now running for governor. 

We want to win awards for writing about what is in public records, not writing about not being able to get records. We want democracy to be protected from the bad actors who thrive in secrecy.