New Campaign Finance Site Mines the Legislature

On Tuesday, a nonprofit foundation based in Berkeley is launching a new website that brings it all together — 6 million pieces of information about California's lawmakers and the poltical contributions they have received. The Maplight site breaks down thousands of bills according to a list of 400 interest groups — from Indian tribes to the bottled water industry. It then calculates how many times a lawmaker has supported those groups, alongside how much they have received.

California's system of tracking political contributions is better than almost every other state, but it's still not perfect. Political reporters have to create their own databases, download what is available through the Secretary of State's website, then manually enter any cross-matching information. It's a time-consuming process to find out how much money a lawmaker has received from a certain industry, and match those contributions to a lawmaker's votes in the Legislature. Multiply that by 120 lawmakers, and it's a nightmare.

So far, the Maplight database is still catching up to the considerable amount of information available. It's not up to date, and it ends in 2004. But November voters can get some idea, however old, about Assembly members and Senators running for reelection. And in the future it could be a valuable resource for the public — and a constant thorn to lawmakers and lobbyists.