well it's not often an overwhelming majority of New Jersey residents agree on something but both Republicans and Democrats appear to be United in rejecting changes to the open public records act a new fairly Dickinson University poll out today finds controversial changes to Oprah currently being considered by the legislature face serious skepticism from Garden State voters 81% of registered voters in the state say they support keeping the system as it is rather than tightening access to public documents as the bill proposes for more details I'm joined by fdu poll director Dan Cassino Dan thanks so much for joining the show okay so this is pretty remarkable what did you find when you pulled residents about this bill so we found 81% of newers Voters say that that Oprah should be kept as it is only 14% say that it should be changed and this is actually a very difficult question to poll because number one the public doesn't know a lot about this bill this is a technical bill this is a bill about process and that's normally not what voters pay a lot of attention to and also merely the fact we were trying to create a balanced item one that you know fairly represent the arguments on both sides and honestly when we tested versions of this question we got a lot of push back from our pretest saying well that can't possibly what this bill actually does uh and so this was a very very balanced version of this question it's still only 14% in favor of it there's just an enormous amount of skepticism about this potential change only 14% in favor and was that across the board when it comes to background geography uh partisanship yeah there's really no big differences here so we do find that Democrats are a little more likely than Republicans to support at 15% versus 10% uh but we don't see big differences on the basis of race or age or ethnicity or any of the things we normally expect are really going to matter in these sort of issues we can't find any demographic that says you know what this seems like a great idea so what kind of weight do you think poly policy makers should put into that because the current version of the the bill was pulled there are um clarifications so to speak that are being made and supporters of this have said listen if the public really knew the nitty-gritty of what was inside of it they would be behind it so what do you think policy makers should think about these numbers well I it's entirely possible that if policy makers were to do a good job of explaining the public exactly what was in the bill and why they should support it that these numbers would be different but they haven't done that yet we've seen the efforts on this bill have really been to jam it through the legislature as quickly as possible way reminiscent to the elac bill from not too long ago and this seems very much like they don't want very much public scrutiny on this and that's why the know this is being moved so quickly uh we have heard word that we're expecting if the bill is going to be brought back is gon to be brought back in the next week or so and we still actually don't know what the changes to the bill look like you know this is sort of thing it's almost ironic that we're looking at a transparency Bill and there's not a lot of transparency about it yeah which has been the argument and what a lot of the contention has been about all along so Dan did you break it up um and ask the folks who responded to the survey about parts of the bill I mean there are certain instances where they say that it's being abused that's Oprah I'm talking about um that the the ACT is being abused and municipalities are inundated um or did largely people just feel like access needs to be as open as possible when it comes to government records so a lot of this came up in our pretesting where we went back and we're trying different arguments to try and get balanced arguments uh on the item and all the arguments you brought up about you know about municipalities being inundated about companies getting access to records all of that really paled in comparison with the counterargument that the that supporters of Oprah have made which is that this is about uncovering Municipal corruption and once you bring that up it almost doesn't matter what the arguments on the other side are to say this is about you know trying to make sure that municipalities have to answer for what they're doing and exposing corruption exposing bad behavior it almost doesn't matter what the argument on the other side is people weigh that so much more heavily Dan Cassino is the director of the fdu poll Dan thanks so much always a pleasure