It's unbelievable that there should even be a debate about this:
A bipartisan group of seven senators would like the upper chamber to join the digital age.
They're asking the Senate Rules Committee to reverse the Senate's "antiquated" policy of refusing to publish the electronic data, or XML files, behind Senate roll call votes posted online. While the House has provided the XML behind the votes for about five years, the Senate has spurned entreaties to do the same from transparency advocates such as the Sunlight Foundation. [...]
Voting is the most basic Senate action and is of crucial importance to the public. Yet the Secretary of the Senate is constrained by an antiquated policy on how roll call votes can be published on the Senate website.
Apparently some senators don't want to make it too easy to look up their records:
When it comes to roll call votes, transparency advocates of the technological bent say the House is worlds better than the Senate because the House clerk provides the XML files behind the votes — language that looks like a database to a computer and allows developers to easily reuse the data on their own websites.
The Senate clerk’s office has resisted providing that information, despite being pressed by open government advocates, said Wonderlich.
The reason they’ve been given: “The secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy ... that they’re not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to,” Wonderlich said. “It’s pretty bad.” [...]
J.H. Snider, president of iSolon.org, a think tank dedicated to using information technology to further democracy, said there’s a qualitative difference between making information public and making it “meaningfully” public — that is, in the easiest, most logical and most timely way.
But “lawmakers want to maintain as much control as possible over their records; they want to be able to highlight what’s useful,” he said. “They have nothing to gain by making it easy for opposition candidates to do research and whatnot.”
It will be interesting to see who comes out in opposition of this request.