Gov Civic · Ordinary People
The software engineer who made his town's budget readable, then told his neighbors to audit him
Marblehead, Massachusetts
Andrew Baber pointed an AI at 3,000 pages of Marblehead's own financial documents, published the charts before the override vote, and put the whole repo online so anyone could go looking for the bias.
The person and the place
Andrew Baber moved to Marblehead, Massachusetts in 2017 and stayed out of town arguments for years. A software engineer by profession, Baber holds no town office, and the site's own disclosure page says so before it says anything else: "Made by Andrew Baber, a Marblehead homeowner and parent. Not on the Select Board, the Finance Committee, or any other town body, and not affiliated with any campaign or advocacy group."
The problem they cared about
In the spring of 2026 Marblehead faced three competing override questions, at $9 million, $12 million, and $15 million, and the debate had outrun the arithmetic. "I found it really difficult to have actual discussions that weren't just emotional," Baber told Itemlive. "People would say stuff that felt like there were some facts behind it, but it was really hard to actually dig into those facts."
The agency moment
The numbers were already public, sitting in 39 primary-source PDFs running past 3,000 pages. Baber started charting them and posting the screenshots to Facebook, then built a page so residents could look for themselves. Knowing exactly how software gets made, Baber chose to direct Claude Code rather than write it. "I would say maybe not 100%, but certainly north of 99%," Baber said of the division of work. "I have not written a single line of code."
What changed, with evidence
In roughly five days the page became marbleheaddata.org, logging more than 700 code updates and over 500 feature changes, with charts on school staffing, insurance trends, peer-town comparisons, and a calculator for what each tier would cost a household. "People found it really helpful," Baber told WBZ NewsRadio. Baber publicly supported the override, and says plainly that some residents may read the site through that lens: "I tried really hard to be extremely center of the road. Here's the data. Here are the facts. Make of it what you will." On June 9 the town approved the $15 million question, 4,278 to 3,594, on 8,092 ballots, the heaviest turnout at an annual town election in the Marblehead Independent's records since 2006. In July, Itemlive reported the site had "helped many residents better understand the town's finances."
The move worth copying
Baber is candid that the machine makes mistakes and that not every number has been checked back to its source document by hand. So the whole thing sits on GitHub with a prompt published for anyone who wants to come after it: "audit this site. find the bias. follow the money. be skeptical." Your town's budget documents are almost certainly online too, and almost certainly unreadable. Start with one chart, then hand it to somebody who disagrees with you.
"I want this site to be a valuable tool for anyone coming to it. Whether you're a hard yes, hard no … or somewhere in the middle." — Andrew Baber, Marblehead Current
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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