Transparency Corps is the crowdsourcing project of the Sunlight Foundation that allows participants to take part in tasks that improve government transparency. One of the current tasks, “How Many Votes,” has participants look up the election information for members of the House and Senate, including number of votes, % of the vote, and the year of their last election.

When a participant starts the task, the name a member of Congress appears with a form to input the data as well as a link to that member’s state election page. After finding the information for about 80 members I thought of some ways that the process could be improved.

1) Include the Congressional District for House members – A few states require you to choose the district in order to view the election results. Since currently the form page only includes the state and party, participants would have to either keep trying different districts until they found the member they were looking for or do a Google search to find the district. Both options take time. If the form page included the district of representation that step could be skipped.

2) Allow participants to go through a state delegation in sequence – Currently when you complete the information for a member it assigns you a seemingly random member next. This requires participants to keep jumping back and forth from state elections pages. I created a bookmarks folder with the links to the direct results for each state when available, but the process still wastes a lot of time. For a state like California with a large Congressional delegation and all of their results in the same place, I would have been able to hammer out the information for 52 members of Congress very quickly if I could have done them in sequence.

3) Find a way to account for appointed Senators – I kept being asked to enter the past election information for Senators Gillibrand and Burris, who both were appointed and have no election information for that post. The form does not allow you to enter zeros or indicate an appointment, so they kept appearing as an assignment.

With those changes I think the community could get through the compilation of that election information a lot faster.