Richard Kimball wrote today to say that Project Vote Smart’s Voter Self Defense “Manual” is complete. He thanked seven different people and organizations for our ideas and for helping make it happen. But in fact, it’s the tens of millions of Americans who use this site who should be thanking him and Vote Smart’s remarkable staff and volunteers for what they have created.

Usage of the site has exploded. It gets as many as 7 million hits a day (you read that right, that’s hits per day) — a 2300% increase over any other election year first quarter. Their estimate is that will get some 30 million hits by the election’s end. Cite those stats to people who pooh-pooh American’s interest in politics.

One hundred and fifty-four organizations, Clear Channel, LA Times, Gannet News Service, Dish Network among others are using their APIs to enrich their own reporting. (Sunlight modestly helped Vote Smart’s able technologists in this arena.)  Vote Smart aggressively developed their APIs because of the core desire to give everythin g they have to anyone might be able to use it, multiplying their work many-fold. Theory proven right.

Many kudos Vote Smart friends. Job well begun! (The job is never done…)

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I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Richard Kimball, the founder and president of Project Vote Smart, the nation's premier information resource about candidates for public office at all levels. If you haven't checked out your lawmakers (whether Congressional, Gubernatorial or state legislative) on their site, you're missing information you need to know before you vote.

Richard related to me a very distressing fact. That in this age of transparency, candidates are less willing to tell the people where they stand on issues.

Vote Smart has conducted a National Political Awareness test since 1996. This test asks one core question of politicians: "Are you willing to tell citizens your positions on the issues you will most likely face on their behalf?"

Shockingly, there has been a precipitous drop off in candidates who are willing to answer yes to that question. In 1996, 72 percent of the Congressional candidates responded to the survey saying "yes." In 2006 only 43 percent have done so. The results are similar for Gubernatorial candidates (though the drop is steeper going from 77 percent to just 48 percent); and less steep but disturbingly low for state legislative candidates (from 36 percent to 26 percent responding positively.)

To see if your lawmaker responded, check here.

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There are really a surprising number of Websites that track legislative activity, most of them the result of enterprising individuals. Probably the database with the biggest reach is the one maintained by the Washington Post. Project Vote Smart’s probably has the longest history. TechPolitics (which houses and mashes census data and other government information along with voting records and provides bill tracking) focuses on House votes and is headed by the very accomplished Ken Colburn. GovTrac, founded and run by linguistics’s graduate student Joshua Tauberer,has an automated system to track bills, issue-by-issue, Congress-wide.

Then there’s Congress Merge, Voter Information Services’ Congressional Toolbox, and Progressive Punch, the latter of which has a really friendly interface.

I’m guessing there are a lot more of these sites and I’d like to build a really comprehensive list. My sense is that a lot of these folks do not know one another and that there might be some kind of terrific synergy out there waiting to happen if Sunlight can connect them.

Let me know what I am missing so we can compile a comprehensive list. And of course, we’ll make it available.

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