When the Framers envisioned a government, they envisioned a republic - a government dependent on the people alone.
In 2012, super PACs spent a billion dollars; seventy-three percent of the money came from a hundred people.
Our government has become dependent on the funders.
openPAC is a mission to make the government dependent on the people alone. We seek to remove legislators' dependence on big dollar donations by:
- making a platform to easily determine where legislators stand on various issues, and
- allowing the money to come from a more representative source via our Donate to Positions, Not Politicians platform (currently disabled in production to prevent actual money transfer).
We make it easy to become well informed with respect to legislators’ positions by allowing the people to take Stances, whereby you present an issue, a position on that issue, and the legislators you believe support that position. Other users can then:
- affirm your stance to let others know that it’s accurate,
- support that position by making a diversified donation to those legislators through our donation platform,
- take their own stance on an issue they’re familiar with, and most importantly,
- be a more well-informed citizen.
We also built a data model to determine how each legislator tends to vote on a given issue. We display this tendency as a 'left-right' spectrum for each legislator for a given issue.
openPAC is inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s TED Talk “We the People”, in which Lessig stated: "If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America, the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising, but fundraise from a wider slice of America."
