WINTER 2006-07 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMDENDMENT FOUNDATION

Secretary of State Cathy Cox moved records from musty file cabinets in Atlanta and onto the Internet, where citizens can read and benefit from them

‘The government belongs to the people, and the people have a right to see
everything’
‘Little lady, this is going to get you beat in your next election’

 By Tom Bennett

Decatur, Ga., Dec. 4, 2006 – Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox says she’ll be sure to teach law students about Title 50 of the Georgia Code when she becomes Carl E. Sanders Political Leadership Scholar at the University of Georgia School of Law this Spring.

On July 18 of this year, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor defeated Cox, 249,188 votes to 211,978, in the primary for the Democratic nomination for governor.  (Taylor went on to lose in the general election to incumbent Gov. Sonny Perdue.) So that means Cathy Cox is gathering her belongings in the state capitol and winding up two terms as Georgia’s Secretary of State. But what an era she has led in that office for greater freedom of information in Georgia!

MODERN VOTING SYSTEM

Cox modernized voting in Georgia.  "We were first in the nation to move to an electronic voting system," she told me. "We had no choice. After the 2000 presidential election (Bush defeated Gore), we did an analysis and found we had lost thousands of presidential votes here in Georgia. Cal Tech and M.I.T. did a survey and ranked our voting system second worst in the nation. So we did our homework, looked at all the options, and moved quickly into the electronic voting realm with touch-screen voting in the 2002 election. Cal Tech and M.I.T. now did another survey, and ranked our system second BEST in the nation, second only to Maryland’s."

Her ’06 bid for the governorship became entangled in controversy over a Republican legislator’s new photo i.d. law and voter alarm and high-tech hysteria growing out of touch-screen voting.  "I have no regrets whatsoever," Cox told me. "We moved at a lighting pace, we had to. We didn’t want to have any doubt anymore about who had won the election."

CAMPAIGN, CORPORATION AND LICENSING DATA ON WEB

Cox was the Georgia secretary of state who made campaign and finance disclosure available on the web. (The management of this important disclosure process has moved to the Ethics Commission.)  "To me it was pretty fundamental," Cox said. "The government belongs to the people, and the people have a right to see everything. Believe me, I had a few legislators angry at me. A year or two later, Gov. (Roy) Barnes passed electronic filing. Putting sunshine in the records has made a big difference in the way people understand how money affects politics."

Cox’s reform was "the first move towards true transparency in campaign finance in Georgia," said Chris Riggall, spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office.

That was just the beginning. Cathy Cox also made Georgia corporate records available on the web.  "This has made a huge transformation in how we deal with corporations," she said. "We can essentially guarantee that we’ll get your paperwork done in three or four days. You now can e-mail your documents to us. The Business and Legal communities love being able to access our records.

"Choosing a name for your new business used to be one of the slowest aspects of the process. For example, if you want to name yourself ‘ABC Corporation,’ you used to have to write us and have us search for you and tell you whether anyone else has that name. Now you can go into the web and instantly know if anyone does."

Filing-cabinet manufacturers hate Cathy Cox, who disappointed them as she made professional licensure information -- even the disciplinary history -- available on the web.  "We had had this information forever, but it was of no use to anyone sitting in a filing cabinet in Atlanta," Cox recalled. "Now if, say, you’re going to employ a nurse, you can click on the name on the web and check her or him out online."

It was her work on licensing that led to another Cox reform. In this one, Cox shocked Atlantans when she taught them there is a Macon, and furthermore, it is at the very center of the state.  "We were faced with a decision about what to do with our professional licensing system, then located on the other side of the Atlanta City Hall from us in a building that was a dump," Cox recalled. "I was told by the building authority to find a place to go. It hit me that I control these records, and with the new technology, they didn’t have to be here, they could be anywhere.

"By moving the licensing division to Macon, we have saved thousands of miles of driving to Atlanta by Georgians, and thousands of dollars in rent in Atlanta.  "But while we were making that move, former House Speaker Tom Murphy said to me, ‘Little lady, this is going to get you beat in your next election.’ He just couldn’t imagine any part of Georgia government being outside of Atlanta."

MELTING THE ARCHIVES ‘ICE CUBE’

Cox saved Georgia’s archives, moving them out of the "ice cube" building at Capitol Avenue and I-20. In that windowless architectural oddity of the 1960s, conceived by Gov. Ernest Vandiver and Secretary of State Ben Fortson, gas fumes wafting up from the parking deck in the basement threatened to destroy Georgia’s historical records.

Now the archives are in the glittering new structure on Jonesboro Highway in Morrow, near Clayton State University. There they are next door to another brand-spanking new structure, one that houses the National Archives and Records Administration Southeast Region office. Morrow is the disclosure center for the future, sort of a Georgia Freedom of Information Super Center.

"NARA started that ball rolling because it had outgrown its facility in East Point," Cox recalled. "It was NARA that first agreed with Clayton State to move. Then every time I had a meeting with my archivists, they suggested we partner with NARA, and we did."

TITLE 50 HAS Georgia’s Open Meetings and Open Records law. These traveled around with Cathy Cox when she was a reporter in Bainbridge and Gainesville.  "For years I had with me, every day all the time, my Georgia Press card with the basic tenets of the meetings and records laws. It was in my wallet so I could pull it out and show it if anyone was trying to stonewall me."

Tom Bennett writes about access issues for Georgia FOI Access.