Project Vote Smart

This is the accountability that we talked about with Denise. Want to know exactly how your elected official votes? This page has a full database of every vote going back a long way. I checked out Barbara Boxer's record and it goes back to 1992, and I'm sure it goes back further.

Here is Barbara Boxer's record: http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=53273

However, this site offers so much that it ends up being clunky and, most likely, underused. The data is presented in a way that would make scraping the data and wrapping into another webpage fairly simple.

Seems like a pretty interesting organization. They're rhetoric is designed to place them completely neutral in politics, the intent is purely to educate Americans. "Vote Self Defense" is what they call it. Check out membership rule #1:

"1. No one can join the Project's board without a political opposite. People as diverse as former Presidents Carter and Ford, former Senators McGovern and Goldwater, former Governor Dukakis, former Congresswoman Ferraro and current Senator McCain have served on the Project's board, supporting the efforts of the Project's students and volunteers, and ensuring balance and strict impartiality in PVS programs and services."

The other primary point of interest for this site is the Political Courage Test. As the site describes:

"The Political Courage Test asks candidates which items they will support if elected. It does not ask them to indicate which items they will oppose. Through extensive research of public polling data, we discovered that voters are more concerned with what candidates would support when elected to office, not what they oppose. If a candidate does not select a response to any part or all of any question, it does not necessarily indicate that the candidate is opposed to that particular item."

However, I couldn't find any actual values from this test for particular congressmen. Could be that not many people actually took the questionnaire.

Finally, this site has a great breakdown of campaign finances. Barbara Boxer has $20 million?? And she's only spent $16Mil? Fascinating.

http://www.votesmart.org/finance.php?can_id=53274

Great site, but underused. I hadn't heard about it until I searched around.