If you’re having a hard time getting excited about this year’s slate of American elections (what, the Jacksonville mayoral election isn’t doing it for you?), now is a good time to remember that there are other democracies and some of them are also fascinating. Other than perhaps the Nigerian elections, the most interesting race going on right now is in Delhi, where voters will elect a new legislature later this week. The main contenders are the Aam Aadmi Party of anti-corruption activist Arvind Kejriwal, which briefly ruled Delhi last year before its coalition collapsed, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (currently in power nationwide under Narendra Modi) led by Kiran Bedi.

To put this in an American context, imagine that Larry Lessig managed to lead a third party to power in a major city and that the Republicans then managed to recruit an esteemed former chief of police – Bill Bratton, say – to run against him. (In this analogy, also imagine that Bratton was the country’s first female police officer and a former ally of Lessig’s to boot.) That analogy is imperfect for several reasons, not least the different role of individual candidates in a parliamentary system, but you get the idea.

Control of India’s 19th most populous state* probably doesn’t have too many implications for the United States, but this election is surprisingly relevant to American political debates. Arguments about corruption – how to fight it and who is guilty of it – have featured prominently. While Kejriwal and Bedi made their names fighting lower-level venality, the last days of the election have seen both parties fling accusations that should sound very familiar to American political observers: self-dealing candidates, shady donations, and more.

The parallel is interesting to me because the AAP has done something that no American party has attempted, as far as I know: They’ve put all sorts of information about their donations online in an accessible format.

AAPTrends.com is a treasure trove of data I desperately wish I could get from the Democratic and Republican parties. It breaks down the parties funding by date, state and country(!) of origin, district, and donation size. This kind of geographic analysis is something that we at the Center for Responsive Politics do for FEC data – at great expense, at least in person-hours – but few if any other organizations do the same, and certainly not the parties themselves.

At one point, AAPTrends apparently featured more individual donor data, but took it down because donors feared retaliation – another issue familiar to American campaign finance, although I’d suggest that the fears are a little more realistic in India. The party’s official site, however, still features a list of individual donors.

AAPTrends should intrigue anyone who studies campaign finance or transparency in the U.S. because it’s an example the kind of real-time disclosure that Anthony Kennedy’s Citizens United opinion assured us we’d have any day now. Unfortunately, it also illustrates why Kennedy’s vision was a pipe dream.

It turns out that when you voluntarily put a bunch of sensitive information about your party online, people comb through it and are generally able to turn up one or two things that look fishy. In the AAP’s case, these range from trivial accounting errors to possibly more serious transgressions. (The AAP is also running into the same pitfall that tripped up Lessig and his allies; when you want to hold politicians to a higher standard, people apply those standards to you in ways that are exacting and sometimes unfair.)

Anyway, it turns out that the compliance firms and party higher-ups that don’t disclose more than absolutely necessary know which side their bread is buttered. Instead of the “prompt disclosure” that Kennedy described, what we have right now is a hodgepodge: an often unworkable official government site, a few understaffed groups like CRP and the National Institute on Money in State Politics trying to wrangle the data into usable form, and occasional one-off disclosures by political actors under pressure. As a result, what we know about who funds our politics and how the money is spent is a – I already used the word “hodgepodge”, so let’s go with a potpourri, a salmagundi, or perhaps a farrago. That serves incumbent interests pretty well and is therefore not likely to change.

*Technically a territory, much like the District of Columbia