Overview
Common Cause is a nonpartisan watchdog working on voting rights, ethics, and government accountability. From August 2016 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 API, and match it to local representatives through the Google Civic Information API — so a visitor 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.
