Voters finding information on Web As Election Day nears, traffic high on sites filled with political data

WASHINGTON – In the eleventh hour before the Nov. 7 elections, voters are turning to nonpartisan, nonprofit Web sites that track political money and members of Congress to make a more informed decision on Election Day, according to political experts.

“We have been maxing out our bandwidth for the last week, and I think a lot of it has to do with the election coming up,” said Massie Ritsch, communication director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a research group that tracks money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy.

Since Oct. 10, the site has registered its biggest traffic days ever, Ritsch said, and hit levels it hadn’t seen since the final days of the 2004 presidential elections.

The center’s Web site, opensecrets.org, compiles data from the Federal Election Commission and organizes it into a user-friendlier format. It allows people to search their Congress member’s campaign donations, personal finances, travel expenditures and much more.

For example, the Web site shows that U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud, the Maine Democrat, received nearly $200,000 from union political action committees. Most candidates get a majority of their PAC contributions from business interests rather than labor unions or ideological groups. This is not the case, however, for Michaud, who spent part of his life as a union card carrying millworker.

“They’re such great resources,” Ritsch said of the Web sites. “People really shouldn’t enter the voting booth without examining how the candidates they are considering are funded, because that funding ties back to the voter’s daily life.”

Jock Friedly, founder and president of another online political watchdog, agrees. His newly launched site, legistorm.com, documents congressional staff salaries.

“If you’re out in Iowa, it’s very difficult to find out what your member of Congress is doing in Washington,” Friedly said. “You see press releases coming in, or you see stories in a local newspaper that are based on press releases from the member of Congress, but you don’t actually know truly what the member of Congress is doing. So sites like this finally enable [voters] to get some basis for understanding what’s going on in Washington.”

Friedly said he hopes the site is not useful just to journalists, researchers, and current and would-be staffers, but also to regular citizens who simply want to know how their representatives spend public money.

Thus, clicking on U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe’s name, reveals 47 staffers on the Maine Republican’s payroll, their positions and the amount they were paid during different pay periods.

LegiStorm launched in the beginning of September. Before the site was created, people had to weed through thousands of pages in the document rooms of the House and the Senate in Washington to discover who was being paid what.

“We get a lot of traffic from the Hill, but the majority of the users are from outside Capitol Hill,” he said. “We certainly have had quite a number of comments from the public who are very happy to see more information about Congress.”

Similarly, the Web site for the Center for Public Integrity, publicintegrity.org, an independent journalism organization that at the end of September released information on campaign consultants and the high cost of campaigns, also is experiencing high volume.

“We know that traffic to our Web site always increases the week before an election, and that is occurring already again this year,” said Wendell Rawls, the center’s interim executive director.

People who give to Michaud’s campaign, for example, can search the site to see how their campaign donations are being spent toward his re-election. In the last federal election Michaud spent $917,283 in payments to campaign finance consultants.

“The more information voters have, the more likely they are to vote, and the more information they have, the more insightful their vote is,” he said.