It appears that the project is a casualty of both bad luck and the recent recession, having its funding cut off from foundations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts and the MacArthur Foundation. But it also took a major financial hit in 2009 when the JEHT Foundation, one of its major backers with a focus on civics, shut down because most of its endowment was tied up in Bernie Madoff's fraudulent hedge fund...
"I think if we're going to have a hope of combating the influence of political advertising, it will be through building good, objective sources of information that people can turn to," says Tom Cross, a computer security researcher in Atlanta, Georgia, who's been using Project Vote Smart's APIs to build an experimental voter guide to regional and local politicians called the Wiki Voter Guide. "We can use the Internet to build better information resources, but in order to do that, some of the basic data about who is running for office where needs to be made available in an open format that people can access, experiment with, and build on top of."
