It’s always interesting to find out where campaign contributions for the United States’ elected Senators and Representatives comes from. The data is public, but finding the exact numbers aren’t always easy.
Nicholas Rubin, 16 year old high school student, developed a plug-in that will display a breakdown of contributions that Senators and Representatives received on any webpage. All you have to do is install the plug-in, hover your mouse over the name and donation data is displayed in a small window.
Going even further, if you click on the person’s name, you are redirected to OpenSecrets.org where you can see the latest data on contributions. Greenhouse pulls its data from OpenSecrets.org. It’s interesting to see where the contributions for elected officials comes from, but the plug-in seems more of a niche tool rather than something you’ll want to have enabled all the time.
Testing on a CNN.com story, it successfully recognized the name for Marco Rubio, but not Jeb Bush or Rick Perry.
Greenhouse is perfect for people who are interested in politics and finding every detail possible about officials, but most people probably won’t install the plug-in. The plug-in also seems to take up a lot of resources and slowed down Firefox dramatically, forcing a restart of the browser to disable it.
Source: Greenhouse via Washington Post
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