Earlier this year, Democrats won a major victory in the 37th State Senate District of Virginia when Dave Marsden defeated Republican Steve Hunt. The seat was left open when Republican Ken Cuccinelli was elected Attorney General in the fall.

Heading into Election Day, most observers were predicting a Republican victory. Instead the seat became the first legislative district in the country to change hands in 2010. Democrats, led by Majority Leader Richard Saslaw -- a DLCC Board Member -- clearly ran a great campaign, particularly in terms of field.

But an innovative tactic employed by the Democratic Caucus may have also been a factor -- in the days before the election, the district was saturated with Internet advertising:

The caucus spent $15,000 on a brief Web ad campaign, a significant expense considering it was targeted to a small region and ran for only about a week leading before election day on January 12. [Marsden Campaign Manager Mark] Henson suggested the ads helped Marsden eke out the win. "Online advertising contributed to that perfect storm that let us pull off this upset," he said, also stressing the importance of all campaign components. Henson said, "I'm definitely more likely now to dedicate more resources toward online advertising."

Majority Leader Saslaw was a key advocate for employing the online ads, pushing the Caucus to pay for the spending as a in-kind contribution to the campaign. In total, the $15,000 buy generated almost 8 million Web impressions.

In Texas, Scott Hochberg, a Democratic legislator from Houston has set into motion a potential revolution in public education.

The state spends hundreds millions of dollars outfitting Texas schoolchildren with new textbooks every two years, but forward-thinking policymakers like Hochberg are looking to the emerging market of ebooks to provide new educational resources and save taxpayers considerable amounts of money.

Hochberg wants to introduce open-source textbooks to the classroom. Under his proposal the state of Texas would own the content in each book and offer educators, professors, and vendors the ability to update and supplement the materials over time. Just before the last session of the legislature came to a close, Hochberg introduced a bill that would allow the Texas Education Agency to purchase open-source text books for public schools:

The quiet coup could help open the book market, dominated by few giant players, to an entirely new and unpredictable set of providers, from work-a-day teachers and professors to software giants.

In the meantime, the bill gives Texas universities a wide-open door to the schools market: They can approve the work of their own professors, provided they sign off on its accuracy and alignment with state curriculum standards. The law mandates that the State Board of Education “shall” put the university submissions on the state-approved list — it has no power to reject.

Ultimately, Hochberg is looking to pave the way for an entirely new approach to education in his state. If he succeeds, Texas will likely offer a model for policymakers everywhere.

West Virginia House Speaker Rick Thompson, a Democrat, this week announced a plan to begin live streaming audio from House floor sessions and committee meetings online during the 2010 session:

As the House of Delegates continues to update its electronic infrastructure, changes have been made to make the system more efficient and accessible. Over the past few years, the House has been incrementally moving forward with technology, adding computers, a new voting board and an electronic messaging board outside the chamber and in the East Wing, plus some significant sound system improvements.

Best of all, the innovation will come at little cost to the taxpayers of the state:

New sound systems in each of the House committee rooms, as well as certain necessary wiring changes throughout the House of Delegates, have made audio streaming an inexpensive option.

When available, the audio will stream from the website for the Legislature.

Tort reform, specifically for medical malpractice cases, is growing more important in the national healthcare debate – especially after President Obama talked about it in his prime-time speech on Wednesday. But just like with preventive care, health insurance exchanges, and employer mandates, states are providing a crucial testing ground for tort reform ideas as well.

The University of Michigan’s hospital system has found that a basic shift in its doctors’ and hospitals’ approach to medical errors can significantly reduce the amount of lawsuits they face:

The move to an early error-disclosure system in 2002 has paid dividends at the University of Michigan Health System, said Richard C. Boothman, the hospital's chief risk officer. Prior to 2002, the culture was to fight every case, he said. "Nobody said, 'what should we have learned from this?' "

Today the hospital encourages employees to report mistakes, and also to report issues that might lead to mistakes. A committee of peers reviews serious incidents. If the panel determines that a mistake has occurred, the hospital and doctors apologize. In addition, the University of Michigan compensates the patient or the family.

The costs to such a review are high, said Mr. Boothman. They are included in the hospital's risk-management budget, which has grown to more than $3 million annually, up from $500,000 in 2001. But claims against the hospital have been reduced to 106 in 2008 from 121 in 2001.

A stricter reform idea in Georgia, Florida, and Illinois requires malpractice plaintiffs to seek written declarations from medical experts that their lawsuits have merit. Though an expensive requirement (sometimes prohibitively so), the rule helps ensure that plaintiffs and their attorneys have expert opinions informing their cases. It also makes it more difficult for purely frivolous claims to reach the courtroom.

Until we see more data from these experiments, we won’t know for sure how effective – or even counterproductive – these ideas may be. But it still amazes us to see that once again, as on so many issues, the most ground-breaking reforms are happening in the states.

When Democrats won control of the New York Senate, they promised to restore accountability and bring the legislature into the 21st century. Yesterday, they took an important first step in fulfilling that promise by releasing an impressive new website.

Sen. Majority Leader Malcolm Smith introduced the site from his office in New York City:

The Senate's first chief of information officer, Andrew Hoppin, a former NASA "guru," as Mr. Smith described him, and his team of tech whizzes have been working on the Web site since January. They have also been training senators and their staff members on blogging, Twittering and how to gather feedback from the site for their decision-making processes, according to Mr. Hoppin. Nine Senators are Twittering so far, including Mr. Smith.

The site allows constituents to search for legislation by subject area, watch video from lawmakers, and comment on the bills scheduled to be discussed in public hearings. Hoppin and the senators have also introduced an initiative to translate bill text and legal jargon into plain language.

In New York, for years, a division of the state Senate Research Service was responsible for creating a daily "Digest of Newspaper Clippings."

Because Republicans controlled the chamber, these jobs were filled by patronage and the clips were only sent to political allies. The program cost the state about $1.92 million and most people -- even those inside the legislature -- never knew that it existed.

Now Democrats are taking a stand to eliminate the patronage jobs and update the information distribution process:

The Research Service was targeted by Democrats not long after they took power for the first time in four decades in January, with a newly-elected 32-30 seat majority. Tuesday marked the Research Service's last full day of operation, which included the clipping service as well as a core of writers and researchers who toiled in a leased office just up the street from the state Capitol.

The thing to note here is that, instead of filling the positions with loyal Democrats, the new leadership is actually updating the process to take advantage of new technology and offering the content to everyone, regardless of party affiliation:

Democrats' newly-hired Chief Information Officer Andrew Hoppin will oversee an electronic version of the service, in which a small crew will compile stories from newspapers Web sites as well as blogs and e-mail them to Senate members, both Republican and Democrat.

It's amazing how going from X-acto knives to the Internet can change things.

As a response to revenue shortfalls and a renewed public interest in the budgeting process, many states are looking for ways to make government spending more transparent.

Across the country, at least 11 states are currently considering legislation to develop databases which would allow anyone to track the way state tax dollars are spent.

Stateline.org reports:

They could join more than a dozen other states which have passed similar legislation or issued executive or department orders since 2007. These states include Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington.

While creating an online database will not create transparency alone, it is an important step in bringing citizens into the process.

In New York, Democratic lawmakers are looking to the web to promote a reform agenda.

Senate Democrats have launched a YouTube channel to solicit feedback from the public about how to improve state legislature.

Staffer Andrew Stengel introduces the channel in the video below:

Lawmakers have also scheduled hearings across the state -- an appropriate way to mix online and offline activities.

In a difficult economic year, Democratic lawmakers are embracing the Internet to give citizens in Iowa an opportunity to offer input and learn more about the state budget.

They're dedicating a portion of their website to a project that they're calling Open Budget:

House Democrats are committed to balancing the budget in a fiscally responsible way that takes care of the needs of hard working middle class families throughout our state. Towards that end, we have created Open Budget Iowa to give the people of Iowa a voice in directing how we make progress towards a balanced budget.

On the front page you will find individual “blog posts” with information about the appropriation process and a staff analysis of different aspects of Governor Culver’s budget. Please use this information to inform your comments and we welcome your input.

On the front page, staffers break down various kinds of spending in specific posts and citizens respond with their own ideas.

This is an excellent use of technology, particularly at a time when more people are paying attention to the budget process than ever before.

Indiana Speaker of the House and DLCC Board Member Pat Bauer met with leaders from the University of Indiana to announce the completion of a 1,178 miles of fiber-optic cable that forms the backbone of the network connecting more than 40 of the state's public and private universities.

The network will provide campus users with Internet connections up to 20 times faster than what they can access in their homes -- allowing researchers to access massive data collections and collaborate with professors from other schools.

The network also will vastly improve distance learning programs by enabling high-quality video streaming and high-definition learning tools like telepresence, a videoconferencing technology that gives users the impression of being in the classroom.

The state also believes that this kind of technological infrastructure will help encourage the opening of new business and the creation of new jobs.

All of which makes this a pretty good investment for $13 million.