Voting is Half the Battle
Getting Americans to vote is hard enough - roughly 36% of eligible voters (an estimated 86 million people) didn't cast a ballot in the 2024 presidential election, according to University of Florida Election Lab data as reported by the Environmental Voter Project. But there's an even harder problem: getting people to pay attention to what their elected officials do after they win.
Beyond the sensational headlines - "Republicans did this," "Democrats did that" - day-to-day accountability is practically nonexistent. We express general outrage, but can anyone really pinpoint where the issues are? Imagine if we had this approach for sports teams. If an NBA team wasn't doing well, would we blame everyone? Sure it's a team sport, but individual stats have to matter a tiny bit as well? Right? Why should Congress be any different?
I set out to track what my own representatives were doing and quickly discovered why most people don't - it's like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. The raw data from sources like Congress.gov and the FEC is overwhelming: vote records, bill sponsorships, committee assignments, campaign finance filings - all scattered across different sites in different formats.
But could this be improved?
What is it?
The Voting Report Card was built to solve this. It pulls data from trusted public sources - the Congress.gov API, the FEC Campaign Finance API, Senate.gov vote records, and the unitedstates project - and distills it into an easy-to-read report card for each elected official. The app grades representatives across six key metrics: attendance, party loyalty, bipartisanship, bills sponsored, bill advancement, and laws enacted. It also categorizes votes into issue areas like healthcare, the economy, guns, the environment, and more - so you can see at a glance where your representative stands.
Why is this just a start?
The goal of the voting report card isn't to be the final word. Correlation is not causation - a low attendance grade might simply mean a representative is campaigning for a different office, not that they're neglecting their duties. The report card is a starting point: if something stands out (good or bad), you can do a deeper dive using the wealth of information available on official sites and across the internet. All data should be viewed with healthy skepticism, as everything carries some bias - whether from the person or from how the data is structured.
How can we play our roles?
This project also underscores why preserving public data matters. This information belongs to the public, and the current administration has already moved to reduce access to various government datasets. Let's not let lack of use become another reason good resources disappear.
If we don’t stay active and informed in politics, then we may lose more and more transparency. Our democracy isn't perfect - far from it. But the hope is that by making accountability easier, even in a small way, more of us can do our part.
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