Visitors to the newly refurbished website, RILegislature.gov, are now met by a clean looking, user friendly, and functional homepage.

“Our new website is aesthetically cleaner and easier to navigate. Our focus is to improve the website and make it easier for Rhode Islanders to engage with their Legislature,” said House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi and Senate President Dominick J. Ruggerio. “We think this site offers significant enhancements that will greatly benefit members of the public. This is the first major website update in decades.”

In regards to ‘Capitol TV’ (the streaming and on-demand video portion of the site) the archived broadcast content is now better organized, and will offer closed captioning.

A new ‘Getting Started’ page provides General Assembly schedules, how to find and track legislation, and various ways to participate in the legislative process.

New pages about House and Senate members make it easier to find each legislator’s news, biography, and contact information.

Also, the ‘Legislative Calendar’ section allows visitors to quickly access information on legislative sessions, committees, and commission meetings.

The State says that the website work is ongoing, with a longer-term overhaul being done in stages with additional improvements emerging throughout 2024.
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Suggestions for updating the website can me emailed to: [email protected] ​

Rhode Island State House – A Senate commission studying alternative voting methods and their potential benefits to Rhode Island has released its findings and recommendations.

The commission’s final report provides an extensive review of non-plurality and runoff voting methods, details their potential advantages and disadvantages to Rhode Island, outlines potential legal and logistical challenges to their adoption and presents methods of selecting winners in elections that commission members feel could be beneficial for Rhode Island.

 “This report will inform our legislators and the public as we consider bills to enact versions of these alternative voting methods in the upcoming session,” said Sen. Samuel D. Zurier (D-Dist. 3, Providence), chairman of the commission. “Our right to vote is fundamental to our democratic form of government, so we must proceed carefully with changes to our system. With that said, our pure plurality voting system has produced results in multi-candidate elections that have raised questions about the consistency of the outcome with the bedrock principle of majority rule. I personally plan to introduce legislation to ask the voters to amend our Constitution to clear the legal path for some of these alternatives.”

“I want to thank my fellow commission members for their contributions to our understanding of this complex and important topic, and to the Senate legal staff for presenting the Commission’s work in this comprehensive document,” said Senator Zurier. “And I want to extend a special thanks to all those who testified before the commission. Their presentations added significantly to the report’s quality and scope.”

The Special Senate Commission to Study Non-Plurality Voting Methods and Runoff Elections for General Assembly and General Officer Primaries was composed of seven members appointed by Senate President Dominick Ruggerio: Senator Zurier, Sen. Leonidas P. Raptakis (D-Dist. 33, Coventry, West Greenwich), Sen. Anthony P. DeLuca II (R-Dist. 29, Warwick), Board of Elections Executive Director Robert Rapoza, Director of Elections Kathy Placencia, Cranston Registrar/Director of Elections Nick Lima and Coventry Board of Canvassers Clerk Lori Anderson.