Politics

RaceTracker Had a Good Opening Weekend

By Sunlight Foundation & Participatory Politics Foundation

In the first weekend since its debut last Thursday, the RaceTracker project on OpenCongress had 21 volunteer editors update 61 House, Senate and governor races across the country and visitors viewed pages more than 15,000 times. We were also very pleased to have DailyKos implement automatic links to RaceTracker from all posts tagged with a congressional district, senate seat or governor’s election.

The first few days also showed how the safeguards of the system ? principally the requirement that every addition be linked to an outside, verifiable source ? worked to maintain the integrity of the information on the wiki.

For example, a new editor updated the page on the Michigan 9th Congressional District, home of incumbent Rep. Gary Peters (D), to downgrade candidate Michael Bouchard® from a “potential” to “rumored” candidate since he was now running for governor and to add Andrew “Rocky” Raczkowski® as a “confirmed candidate.” The editor said that Raczkowski campaign literature had been distributed in Michigan but failed to provide a source, setting off a red flag and falling short of our standard of a source for every entry.

The best information we could find was that Raczkowski was said to be a candidate, but that local press was unable to reach him for confirmation (probably because he’s currently serving in Iraq). So, until someone can provide a better source, Raczkowski has been downgraded to “rumored.” On the plus side, we now have a more candidates on the Michigan governor page!

Among the races updated over the last few days:

AK-AL , AR-01, AR-02, AR-03, AZ-05, CA-03, CA-06, CA-10, CA-32, CA-46, CO-03, CT-04, FL-04, FL-05, FL-16, FL-24, HI-01, IA-03, IL-08, IL-09, IL-14, IL-18, IN-08, KY-01, MD-01, MD-06 , ME-02, MI-02, MI-09, NC-04, NE-02, NH-02, NV-03, NY-23, NY-29, OR-01, PA-07, PA-10, PA-16 , SC-01, SC-04,TN-07, TN-08, TN-09, TX-23, TX-26 , TX-32, VA-07

AR-Sen, CA-Sen, CO-Sen, CT-Sen, DE-Sen, FL-Sen, IL-Sen, NY-Sen (both seats), OR-Sen, UT-Sen,

CT-Gov, MD-Gov, MI-Gov, NJ-Gov, NM-Gov, VA-Gov

We’re still in the early stages of the project and we’d love to get any feedback or suggestions you may have. Email us directly.

Full post as published by Open Congress on June 17, 2009 (boomark / email).