Greenhouse: Political Transparency in the Digital Age

The influence of money in politics is a huge issue that, even this week, keeps getting bigger. Even though I can’t cast my first ballot until next November, I’ve seen enough to know that our political system desperately needs fixing. Although the vast majority of Americans are concerned about political corruption, data related to Congressional campaign finance isn’t easily accessible. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), the agency that collects the data, has done a terrible job reporting it to the public. So last year, when I was a high school sophomore, I set out to make it easier for citizens to see the overwhelming impact of money in our political system.

There are a few great organizations, like the Center for Responsive Politics (which runs OpenSecrets.org) and the Sunlight Foundation, that have invested significant resources towards improving upon the FEC by gathering and reporting campaign contribution data, but even their data is somewhat hard to find unless you knew where to look for it. Fortunately, OpenSecrets also has an API that makes its data available to developers. That gave me the idea to build a browser extension that puts this data where it would be most relevant: on web pages where people read stories about the actions (or lack of action) of members of Congress every day. So I taught myself how to code and created Greenhouse to bridge this gap.

Greenhouse can be downloaded for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. It’s pretty simple. First, it highlights the names of members of Congress on any web page. When you hover your mouse over those names, a pop-up box appears that lists their total campaign contributions, the percentage of small donor contributions (that is % < $200), top 10 industry donors, and a little badge indicating whether the member supports campaign finance reform. By making the data available where people read stories about Congress, Greenhouse lets people see the money story behind the news story.

A few weeks before the midterm election last month, I released version 2.0, which provided additional information in the election races identified as toss-ups by Real Clear Politics. Version 2.0 gave a head-to-head comparison of the two candidates’ contributions so that voters could make better-informed decisions as they contemplated the races.

Since I released Greenhouse six months ago, there has been a fantastic response. At this point, it has over 100,000 users. I’ve received a ton of incredible feedback from users, nearly all of whom were enthusiastic about increased transparency around the political system. Over a hundred emails from outside the United States asked if I could do the same for them (unfortunately, this data isn’t as readily available elsewhere). What this has shown me is that people in America and beyond crave and deserve greater transparency about the role of money in politics.

Looking ahead, I plan to do what I can to continue to increase that transparency. For instance, I’m currently working on making Greenhouse’s data more robust by including things like PAC and non-profit contributions. But it shouldn’t be on me, OpenSecrets or the Sunlight Foundation to fulfill what should be a basic function of government. As I discussed in an Ignite talk in Seattle in October, we should insist that the FEC make the campaign contribution data that it already collects be more comprehensible and accessible to the average citizen. This is their job, and they’ve let the ball drop. The FEC’s website and organization of the data is slow, confusing and outdated. Take a look and – if you can even find the data – you’ll see that it’s formatted like a spreadsheet from Excel 4.0, which came out five years before I was even born.

With or without campaign finance reform, the FEC can take simple steps now and provide increased transparency in order to help voters make better-informed decisions. Fortunately, they have begun this process.  If you want to help improve our government for the better, please write the FEC and provide technical input on Github. Now’s the time they need input from people who care and have ideas.

It was an honor to have the chance to present to CodeX. We had a great discussion, and I will definitely keep everyone’s ideas in mind as I move forward with this project.