This blog is now in retirement (i.e., it’s no longer being updated). The blog will remain available to review, as will all of the Hot Topics pages for each 2006 ballot measure.

We’ll assess how the blog and our other resources have performed, and we’ll be back with even more information resources for the next major election cycle.

Our handy cheat sheets of election results for statewide races are now live.

Check out our page of ballot measure and major statewide officeholder results.

We’ve also posted a page of detailed statewide officeholder results, including the tallies for all minor-party candidates.

Also, don’t forget our page of campaign finance figures. It’s a one-stop resource that will tell you where all the big money funding supporters and opponents of the ballot measures came from.

More resources to come, shortly. Stay tuned.

In the Political Muscle blog, the Los Angeles Times‘ Robert Salladay highlights a new (and evolving) campaign finance database and website, MAPlight.org, which has been assembled by TakeBackCA.org. The group describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating Californians about the impact of special interests and tested, proven alternatives to special-interest influence.” So far, the MAPlight site is limited to the 2003-2004 legislative session, with plans to exapnd the coverage.

The documentation for the database says that it will detail (1) how each state legislator voted on each of the 5,000 bills in the 2003-2004 California legislative session; (2) all campaign contributions made to each legislator from 2001-2004, categorized by the interest or industry of the contributor; (3) supporters and opponents of each bill, and the industries and interests those supporters and opponents represent; (4) a description of each bill; (5) and the full text of each bill, including committee reports and amendments.

On a related note, Salladay complains that in order to do campaign finance research,

[p]olitical reporters have to create their own databases, download what is available through the Secretary of State’s website, then manually enter any cross-matching information. It’s a time-consuming process to find out how much money a lawmaker has received from a certain industry, and match those contributions to a lawmaker’s votes in the Legislature. Multiply that by 120 lawmakers, and it’s a nightmare.

It’s true that researching campaign finance data has never been easy, and there’s no excuse for it not being easier — other than the fact that there are multiple special interests with a significant investment in it not getting any easier. This pattern dovetails with the pernicious trend toward the concealment of government information that is legally supposed to be freely and publicly available, along with the watering-down of open-government laws like the Freedom of Information Act, the Brown Act, and the California Public Records Act.

For concise and clear lists of who has contributed to the 13 qualified ballot measures this campaign and in what amounts, visit out Hot Topics pages for each proposition.

The Contra Costa Times has published an interactive map showing the parts of the Bay Area that would be off-limits to sex offenders if the tough 2000-foot residency provision in Proposition 83 go into effect if, as expected, the measure is approved by voters in three weeks. It’s an excellent representation of the effect that the measure would have on a particular region of the state. A statewide map would be even better.

The Contra Costa Times also runs an article on Proposition 83 today, with the following key paragraph:

To legal scholars and critics, including some sex-crime detectives and prosecutors, [the 2000-foot provision] present[s] serious concerns. Among them:

* Whether Prop. 83 would apply to already convicted sex offenders — the thousands now behind bars, on probation or parole, or even the tens of thousands who have been free of the criminal justice system for years, living in the community, some of them homeowners.

* That it would too broadly restrict where all registered offenders can live, including those whose convictions were for sex crimes against adults.

* That it would cross a constitutional line into public banishment if registered offenders could find nowhere to live in most of the state’s population centers — as maps produced by the state Senate suggest.

The article goes on to quote an expert in Ohio, where a 1000-foot sex-offender residency law was enacted in 2003, as saying, “What’s going to happen is that communities are going to go so far [in enacting their own more restrictive variations] that the Supreme Court’s going to have no choice but to step in.”

Consult our Hot Topic page on Proposition 83 for more information, including to a link to a study from the Stanford Criminal Justice Center Sentencing and Corrections Policy Project that goes into detail about the limits that will be imposed on sex offenders by Proposition 83 — including misdemeanor sex offenders, not just those convicted of felonies.

For good, succinct summaries of the 13 measures on the ballot this year, see our Hot Topics pages.

Another good bet is the Los Angeles Times website, which has a good section on the propositions, with short blurbs on the pros and cons of each initiative and who’s financing the campaigns.

One design note: you have to click on the link for each proposition to expand the text block to display each measure’s summaries. Perhaps a minor flaw, but if you’ve not been to the page before, a confusing one.