Open the windows to the state Capitol

But a lawsuit filed last week by MAPLight.org in Berkeley and the California First Amendment Coalition in San Rafael underscores the degree to which the California Legislature has been corrupted by arrogance and allegiance to special interests.

The lawsuit's request is simple and straightforward. It demands that the legislative counsel follow the law by providing the public with access to databases it possesses on legislative records, including voting records.

Those records are available today, but in a limited and cumbersome way.

"It is ridiculous," said Dan Newman, executive director of MAPLight, which has been pressing the legislative counsel to provide access to the digital files of voting records, bill texts and other records. "It takes incredible resources to pry something out of their hands."

There is no mystery about why California politicians might be reluctant to cooperate with MAPLight. The nonprofit, nonpartisan group has set up an easy-to-navigate way for voters to track the connection between contributions and votes in Congress. It hopes to do the same in the state Capitol.

I have no doubt the group would find rich terrain in Sacramento. As readers of our editorial pages over the years know, one of my pet peeves is the tendency of legislators to fail to vote - a practice known as "laying off" or "taking a walk" - on particularly controversial consumer and environmental issues. Time after time, I have found a direct correlation between nonvoting legislators and the flow of special-interest contributions. In one particularly notorious example from 2003, legislators on a key Assembly committee were serving desserts to lobbyists at a private-home fundraiser (advertised as a "Night of Chocolate Decadence") just before a bill to re-regulate energy came up for a vote. The bill died when 11 of the 14 committee members failed to vote.

As someone who has tried to track voting records, I know that the current site (www.leginfo.com) is woefully incomplete - to the point of being misleading - on roll-call votes. Under the Assembly rules, members who missed a vote are allowed to "add on" after the outcome has been decided. And they do - I've caught them, and named names, over the years. Even more outrageously, hours after a measure's defeat or passage, a member can change his or her vote from "yes" to "no" - and vice versa - as long as it does not change the outcome. Again, this is not a theoretical possibility. I've seen it happen - and reported on it.

Such vote-switching is not easy to document now. The leginfo.com site only includes the final (sanitized) roll call. I've been able to find them only when a legislator or aide - typically one who is outraged by the shenanigans over a bill he or she has been working on - provides me with a printout of the legislative record at the moment the roll call closed, and a bill is passed or defeated. It is subject to change before the public can view it.

"That is just scandalous and infuriating," Newman said of the voting-changing. "It just shows the value of transparency."

As much as I'm cheering on this lawsuit, which was filed in Sacramento County Superior Court last week, I hope the result will be online access to the full history of voting records. I believe that Californians should know which legislators are not doing their jobs - not voting on important bills. And I believe an elected official's constituents should know whether he or she voted when a measure was still in doubt or "added on" - or even changed a vote - after the fact.

This lawsuit is against the legislative counsel, but the real culprit here is the California Legislature, which could fix this problem in a Sacramento minute if only it had the will. Public-records law seems to make clear that records should be available in their electronic format. If legislators have any question about the clarity of the law, they have the ability to change it.

On Friday, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, suggested that a resolution may be coming soon.

"When there is no additional burden on government to turn over the information in a user-friendly format, we ought to be stretching and going out of our way to do that," Steinberg said by phone.

This lawsuit needs to be settled. Fast. Its mere existence is a blight on the California Legislature.

John Diaz is The Chronicle's editorial page editor. You can e-mail him atjdiaz@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page G - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle