Transparency International Lithuania parliamentary monitoring site ManoSeimas.lt sees broad success

Transparency International Lithuania has seen strong traffic to its website “ManoSeimas.lt”  (http://manoseimas.lt/) since it was launched a month ago. The site aims to provide Lithuanians with easy access to the voting record of Lithuanian parliamentarians. In the span of a couple of weeks the website has been visited by nearly 20.000 unique visitors, serving as the go-to reference point for people from all over Lithuania and abroad ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections. Such traffic numbers suggest ManoSeimas.lt could be one of the more successful parliamentary monitoring initiatives worldwide if one considers that nearly one percent of potential Lithuanian voters have visited the website in just one month of operation.

“ManoSeimas.lt” means “my Parliament” in Lithuanian and allows voters to examine in a simple manner how political parties and individual parliamentarians voted on various issues over the past four years. The website also prompts its visitors to study the issues that have been voted on in greater depth by presenting arguments for and against such topics as higher education reform, the definition of the family, the Visaginas nuclear power plant, double citizenship or Internet voting. People can also test themselves by indicating how they would have voted on a particular issue and then see which party’s voting record on featured issues corresponds with their position.

This weekend Lithuanians will be electing parliamentarians.

“It’s been great to see that we were able to put into people’s hands a tool they can use independent of us to better understand what the Parliament has been up to in recent years. It is also great to see how well the initiative has been received by the media and the Lithuanian public; how many people helped to spread the word. It also shows that Internet technologies can lie at the heart of a sustainable effort to drive a broad-based demand for greater transparency,” says Sergejus Muravjovas, the Executive Director of Transparency International Lithuania.