PROJECTS

Volunteers come to The Open Records Project with their skills and energy. Often they bring a project.

1. Voter integrity

Our first large database project twenty years ago was to automate the Dallas Examiner Voter Rollcall.
- We uncovered thousands of voters who actually registered using addresses in foreign countries.
- We discovered several thousand possibly non-existent voters with ages greater than 100 years old.
- We discovered hundreds of voters who registered as living at the same vacant lot.

Dallas County substantially cleaned up the registered voter rolls after our disclosures.

- This is an ongoing statewide project.

2. Education

- We analyzed the academic performance of over six thousand Texas campuses. We discovered the top ranked elementary school in the state was Dallas's all-black all-poor J.J. Rhodes and close behind was similarly demographic Houston's Wesley Elementary.

- We uncovered a conspiracy to restrict test taking by failing minority students.

- As a result the Texas "Education Governor" was defeated and the Texas Education Agency was downsized and substantially restructured.

- We uncovered a conspiracy to insert illegal zip codes to cause rejection of records of failing students. The entire Austin School Board was indicted and an Austin ISD Assistant Superintendent went to prison.

- In concert with the NAACP and LULAC we sued Dallas ISD to release the names of several hundred dangerously incompetent teachers based on analysis of open records requested classroom performance.

- Using open records requests we created a ten year financial fraud audit of Dallas ISD records.

- Based on whistleblower provided databases we developed the $50 million "Paid no issue" DISD case and presented it to the US Attorney.

- Due to our work Dallas ISD Superintendent Evonne Gonzales went to prison.

- We recently attempt to recreate the DISD financial audit using current open records documents and were blocked by the District.

- We are once again developing whistleblowers in this case.

3. Child Safety

- After a fight we posted the first free on-line access to a state Sex Offender Registry. In Texas we uncovered statewide failure of the probation system as well as state-run sex offender warehouses in close proximity to children. The model we developed is now used in 39 states.

- Our current analysis of school mass shooters attempts to identify means to save children's (and teacher's) lives.

4. Elderly Protection

- We documented the statewide problem of "State Sponsored Elder Looting" where a state agency created pretenses to commit older citizens to asylums and confiscate their assets.

- We developed informants inside state agencies and asylums.

- Through legal means we were actually able to secure the release of a number of these senior citizens.

- This is a huge and incomplete project that continues to require attention.

5. Crime

- We have begun building a crowd-sourced replacement for the recently defunded Dallas Gang Database.

- This is an open-source project for which we will provide source code to any citizen (or law-enforcement) group.