General Overview
Unlike the other areas of research, the City/County Program is designed to research, collect, and provide critical information about local officials and their governments. With over 30,000 local officials and over 4,500 cities and counties in our database, we currently do not have the resources to devote as much attention to local level officials and governments as we do Federal or State officials, however, it is still very important to provide the basic information that citizens need to conduct their own research, contact their official, and learn about their governments. A citizen is able to go to the Vote Smart website, type in their zip-code, and find those that represent them in their local governments and find information about what is happening in their local government. This information may seem obvious, and easy to find, however, it is not, and these political resources remain some of the most used data on our website. In fact, recently, numerous other political information organizations have attempted to develop databases of these types of resources. None, however, have it all in one place.To create this database of nearly every local official and information on nearly every local government we depend on a team of dedicated staff and interns to complete updates on a rolling basis, depending on when information is available.
What you will be doing:
You will be working on maintaining our vast database of local officials and local governments, including contact information for officials, office information for officials, recording what district the official was elected from, photos for as many officials as have them, and finding government websites and the important pages within them.Why your work is important:
All politics is local! Local officials impact Americans' lives most immediately on a daily basis, yet the information available on them is so minimal. As of a few years ago, a third of these governments didn't even have websites. One locality, for example, wanted to charge us money for a list of contact information for their local officials. While we don't currently have the resources to cover every locality as in depth as Congress, we are providing a critical first step to connecting citizens to those that govern their lives- letting them know who they are, how to contact them, and where to find more information about them. Without easy access to this information, the average citizen may not be able to even find the names of their current officials.What you will learn:
- General learning objectives
- The diverse structures of local governments across the United States
- The variety of services and information provided through government websites, as well as the lack thereof
- Resources for government information at the local level and how to access them
