MapLight

MapLight's mission is to achieve a government that actually works for the people, where lawmakers are responsive to citizen concerns rather than the interests of large campaign donors. Our work aims to:

1. Provide data and research that expose money's influence on politics with a focused approach targeting specific audiences, issues, and jurisdictions where our work can be most impactful.

2. Facilitate informed voting and civic engagement through Voter's Edge and other transparency tools.

3. Advance democracy reforms by providing direct support to help state and local reform campaigns be successful.

4. Combat digital deception by working to pass safeguards against manipulation of public opinion on social media. For example, we are pressuring Facebook to fact-check all political ads so that candidates cannot pay to spread blatant lies.

MapLight engages multiple strategies to achieve our vision of a government that actually works for the people. These strategies include:

- Shining a light on the influence of moneyed interests in elections and on policy decisions through our free maplight.org database and tools, our in-house research and reporting, and our Dark Money Watch site.

- Empowering voter engagement with Voter's Edge, our one-stop online voter guide that provides nonpartisan information about candidates and ballot measures in local, state, and federal elections.

- Fueling new open-source transparency tools that make civic information more accessible and engaging than ever, such as Power Search and the Quick Guide to Propositions, both now live on the CA Secretary of State's website.

- Advancing solutions for local and state reform by providing direct assistance to democracy reform campaigns.

- Developing a framework for policy solutions for digital deception, with transparency and accountability at its center.

MapLight is located in Berkeley, CA and has twelve staff and an annual budget of $1.5 million. Our data team handles all of our data collection and processing, uncovers and identifies significant data within our database, fact checks all research and findings before they are published or distributed. Our Director of Communications distributes the findings of our data and research to journalists, nonprofit groups, and the public. Our Director of Engineering oversees the software development to build, maintain, and improve our databases, builds internal interfaces and tools for data analysis, and builds websites and interfaces through which the public (e.g. accountability actors such as journalists and advocates) may view, search, and analyze our data. Our program team, which includes former Federal Election Commission chair Ann Ravel, contributes policy expertise, research, data analysis, and more. Our operations and development staff support the sustainability of these programs and the strategic vision of the organization.

Since 2009, our findings illustrating the impact of political money on the issues affecting citizens’ everyday lives have reached over 350 million people through TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and other websites. From our work highlighting the obstacles faced by environmental activists working toward reform to our investigations uncovering pay-to-play politics among Cabinet appointees to our expose on how public pension money has been used to fund an anti-rent control campaign in California – and many other investigations like this – our work has invigorated the national debate, empowered accountability advocates, and changed public policy. In the past year, we've also expanded our work combatting digital deception, drawing attention to how micro-targeted political advertising and other strategies are being used to manufacture and manipulate public opinion during political events.

In 2018, our nonpartisan online voter guide Voter’s Edge reached 2 million people -- equivalent to 1 in 8 voters -- in California, providing them with unbiased and nonpartisan information to help them to make better-informed voting decisions about the candidates and issues appearing on the ballot. 91% of Voter’s Edge users said that our guide made them feel more confident about making the right choices on Election Day. 77% of Voter’s Edge users said that they would vote for more offices and leave fewer choices blank thanks to the information they found on our guide.