U.S. civil society organizations are creating powerful tools that inject transparency in the political system.

The New York Times Circuits columns gives the example of two websites that dramatically illustrate the connection between money and voting in the U.S. political system. It is to early to say what political effects such information will have, but it is hard to imagine that it will have no effect, when people can verify that their representative votes are simply “for sale”

The article discusses two webistes:

– Maplight.org, a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups.

– OpenSecrets.org, exposes who’s giving how much to whom.

“Nobody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect.”, writes David Pogue.

He cites the following example:

“If you click the “Video Tour” button on the home page, you’ll see a six-minute video that illustrates the point. You find out that on H.R.5684, the U. S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement, special interests in favor of this bill (including pharmaceutical companies and aircraft makers) gave each senator an average of $244,000. Lobbyists opposed to the bill (such as anti-poverty groups and consumer groups) coughed up only $38,000 per senator … Surprise! The bill passed.”