
Show HN: Weighted campaign donations based on competitiveness - edbaskerville
https://takecongress.org/
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edbaskerville
I built this site because I was looking for a way to donate strategically to
candidates for U.S. Congress and didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. I
wanted something that worked like an index fund, weighting donations to as
many candidates as possible based on the competitiveness of the race, and did
so transparently, so I could see exactly how much was going to each candidate.

Although the goals of the site are obviously political, there are aspects of
it that I thought might interest HN readers:

* the use of a simple mathematical model to determine donation weights

* transparent presentation of donation weights and amounts

* (hopefully) straightforward UX

I’m not much of a web developer or designer, so I'd appreciate any suggestions
for improvement! The site was a good excuse for me to play with Elm, which I
enjoyed, and to fight with CSS, which I did not.

There’s no backend; the site just computes donation amounts and ships you off
to ActBlue to complete the transaction.

The model for weights is pretty simple. There’s a roughly sigmoidal
relationship between vote share and win probability, with win probability
increasing rapidly in the region around 50% vote share. I fitted this
relationship using the outputs from FiveThirtyEight’s 2018 House model; the
cumulative distribution function of a t distribution worked pretty well. The
weights are just the density of the same t distribution, and represent the
relative increase in win probability due to a dollar.

Since FiveThirtyEight’s Congress models aren’t up for 2020, I’m using Cook
Political Report ratings for the House as a rough cut, and a (fully Bayesian)
model by Cory McCartan for the Senate.

~~~
yodon
From the site:

> We split up your donation intelligently with a randomized algorithm

Your description here on HN gives some confidence that something hopefully
intelligent is going on. The description on your website is not going to give
anyone (nerd or not) a compelling reason to use your site.

My suggestion would be to take the content, text, and layout of your website
as seriously as you took the algorithm if you want anyone to use of this cool
bit of math and code you built.

~~~
benchess
It's all pretty well covered in the Methodology section of the about page:
[https://takecongress.org/about.html](https://takecongress.org/about.html)

~~~
edbaskerville
I went ahead and broke that out into a separate page:

[https://takecongress.org/methodology.html](https://takecongress.org/methodology.html)

