Overview
Common Cause is a nonpartisan watchdog working on voting rights, ethics, and government accountability. From August 2018 to June 2026 I was a designer and developer on their special projects and campaigns — the standalone sites that launch around a bill, an election, or a moment in the news and need to be live fast.
Projects included The Democracy Scorecard, Defend Our Constitution, The Impeachment Inquiry, Safe Voting Now, Protect the Vote, Judge the Ads, and more. I also relaunched Our Democracy, the candidate questionnaire site, for every election cycle from 2018 through 2024.
How the sites work
Address to representative: Many of these projects start with a single question: who represents me? I built lookups that take a home address, resolve it with the Google Places and Maps APIs, and match it to local representatives. That match used the Google Civic Information API until the 2024 Democracy Survey, when it moved to TargetSmart. A visitor still goes from typing an address to seeing their own representatives in one step.
Content from a spreadsheet: Scorecards and candidate questionnaires change constantly during a campaign. I set up automated content updates from Google Sheets into WordPress, so data maintained in a spreadsheet flows straight into the live site.
On brand, every time: Each site has its own name and personality, but the designs align with Common Cause branding — typography, color, and patterns that make a new campaign recognizable as part of the same organization.
Our Democracy 2024
The Our Democracy domain wasn’t available in 2024, so that year’s edition was reframed as Democracy Survey 2024. It asked candidates to go on the record about proven democracy reforms, from the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to D.C. statehood and independent redistricting commissions. Voters enter their address to find the candidates on their ballot, see how many reforms each one supports, and read every answer on the candidate’s profile. Each listing has its own tools to tweet, email, call, or send a letter to that candidate, because the number one reason candidates respond is that voters ask them to.
The survey went beyond Congress, with separate questionnaires for state legislative races in California, Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, and North Carolina, and for city council races in Los Angeles, Oakland, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose. After the election, the homepage became a record of the winners and the reforms they committed to, so voters can hold them to it.
Screenshots of past sites are from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.