About
Data practitioner. Civic technologist. Founder.
I built VoteWatching because local government data should be as easy to use as any other modern tool. It's not. So I'm fixing that, one city at a time.
From civic data to civic transparency
I'm Michael Ingram. For over six years, I've built data infrastructure for advocacy organizations, political campaigns, and nonprofits. As a Data Director, I've worked with voter files, built ETL pipelines, managed SQL databases, and turned messy datasets into tools that help organizers do their work.
Through all of that, one thing kept bothering me: city council voting records are technically public, but practically invisible. The data exists in PDFs, buried in Legistar portals, and scattered across meeting minutes that almost nobody reads. The gap between “public record” and “publicly accessible” is massive.
I saw this firsthand while working with All Voting is Local in Arizona, where I helped on a project ensuring that individuals in jail could exercise their right to vote. That experience deepened a conviction I already held: the more people we include in democratic participation, the better the outcomes for everyone. But participation requires access — and access requires information people can actually use.
The same approach, applied before
Before VoteWatching, I built Coponomics — a data project that collected publicly available data on every registered American nonprofit, cleaned and structured it through an end-to-end pipeline, loaded it into a SQL database, and filtered it to analyze the economics of policing in the United States.
That project demonstrated the approach behind VoteWatching: take messy public data that technically exists but nobody can use, build a structured pipeline to process it, and make the output accessible for accountability work. Different subject, same philosophy.
Coponomics
An open data project analyzing the economics of policing through publicly available nonprofit records. End-to-end ETL pipeline processing data on every American nonprofit.
View project →Why VoteWatching exists
VoteWatching exists to make local government voting records actually accessible. Not technically-public-if-you-know-where-to-look accessible. Actually accessible — searchable, understandable, and useful for the people who need them.
State and federal transparency tools exist. At the city council level, the data is scattered, inconsistent, and hard to use. If you want to know how your city council member voted on housing, policing, or zoning, you shouldn't need to spend hours reading meeting minutes.
“Local government data should be as easy to navigate as any other modern tool. That's not idealism — it's a standard that every other industry already meets.”
The Columbus prototype was the proof of concept: 5,717 votes, 64 meetings, and 7,404 agenda items — all extracted from official council records, normalized into a consistent schema, and presented in a dashboard anyone can use. Now the model is ready to scale to more cities.
From raw records to usable data
Collect official records
We extract data directly from official city council minutes, agendas, and legislative management systems. No reliance on city clerk offices or government cooperation.
Normalize and structure
Data columns are standardized across cities so the schema is consistent. Voice votes and roll call votes are flagged separately for accuracy. One shared database serves all cities.
Deliver your dashboard
A clean, searchable interface customized for your city. Council member profiles, vote search by topic, alignment analysis, and meeting archives — all ready for your community.
What guides the work
Data integrity
Every data point is sourced from official city council records. No interpretation, no editorial layer — just the public record, structured and searchable.
Accessibility
Built for non-technical users — advocates, journalists, residents — not just data analysts. If you can use a search engine, you can use VoteWatching.
Independence
VoteWatching works directly from publicly available records. We don't depend on government offices for access or cooperation, which means the data stays reliable regardless of politics.
Scalability
The architecture is built to expand. Each new city uses the same normalized schema and shared database. One city at a time, built to grow.
Ready to bring VoteWatching to your city?
Whether you're an advocacy organization, newsroom, government affairs team, or funder — let's talk about what VoteWatching can do for your work.