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.

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The Sunlight Foundation is organizing a Tweet Lobbying Day today asking Senators to co-sponsor S. 482.

S. 482 requires Senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically. You can learn more at the Pass 482 site.

Here’s the scoop: There are currently seventeen senators on Twitter. For the most part these senators have not yet signed on as cosponsors to S. 482. In fact, only two of the seventeen are already cosponsors. We need your help to petition over Twitter the fifteen who have not cosponsored and ask them to support the bill by signing on as a cosponsor. Each one of these senators will need a tweet sent to them (example: @jimdemint) with a message asking them to cosponsor. Feel free to make up your own message:

Example: @jimdemint Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

The senators to contact with this message are (with example message for posting):

Barbara Boxer, D-CA: @Barbara_Boxer Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Susan Collins, R-ME: @senatorcollins Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

John Cornyn, R-TX: @JohnCornyn Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Jim DeMint, R-SC: @jimdemint Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

John Ensign, R-NV: @johnensign Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Chuck Grassley, R-IA: @chuckgrassley Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Jim Inhofe, R-OK: @jiminhofe Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Mel Martinez, R-FL: @melmartinez Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Claire McCaskill, D-MO: @clairecmc Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Robert Menendez, D-NJ: @senatormenendez Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH: @JeanneShaheen Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Mark Udall, D-CO: @markudall Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Tom Udall, D-NM: @tomudall Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Mark Warner, D-VA: @MarkWarner Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

Roger Wicker, R-MS: @rogerwicker Need your support for Senate e-filing of campaign finance reports. Please cosponsor S. 482!

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