In a tight race, the Democratic Party's pick for presidential candidate could be decided by superdelegates – 795 party insiders who are free to vote for anybody they want at the party's national convention. Candidates lobby for those votes fiercely, in a process that's always unfolded behind the scenes.

But now, thanks to the internet and wiki software, voters can see exactly what those superdelegates are up to, and can even try to apply a little pressure of their own.

Critics of the superdelegate process, which many think will benefit the party insider, Hillary Clinton, have created several new websites that use collaborative software to focus attention on the superdelegates, in the hope that once under a microscope, they'll resist lures like financial contributions and political quid pro quos offered by the competing campaigns.

"There is an unprecedented level of interest in superdelegates, and with this information there's an unprecedented opportunity to pressure those superdelegates however [voters] want to pressure them," says Chris Bowers, co-founder of OpenLeft, and one of the organizers of the Superdelegate Transparency Project.

The Transparency Project lets you click on a map to see which superdelegates come from your state, and who they currently support – Clinton or Obama – if anyone. Every Democratic member of Congress is a superdelegate automatically, and the site's most enlightening feature lets you compare whom they support with whom their constituents favor.

Representative Dennis Cardoza, of California's 18th District, for example, has pledged his vote to Hillary Clinton, while voters in his district favored Barack Obama by 3-2 in the Feb. 5 primary. The site shows scores of similar cases in which a representative's commitment is at odds with the will of his or her constituents; they include superdelegates pledged to both Clinton and Obama.

That trend is what worries 36-year-old Rick Klau, who started a similar site called Superdelegates.org, which explains the Byzantine primary voting process, and geographically maps all the superdelegates.

"As an Obama supporter, I would find it terribly distressing if he won more states and more votes and had more pledged delegates, and wasn't the party's nominee," says Klau, a manager at Google.

The 795 superdelegates make up 20 percent of the more than 3,000 Democratic party delegates: The presidential contenders need 2,025 to win. As of Thursday afternoon, Clinton had 985 pledged delegates as a result of voters' choices in primaries and caucuses, and the endorsements of 259 superdelegates. Obama had 1,116 pledged delegates and 181 superdelegate endorsements, which gives him a slight lead, according to NBC.

Not only are superdelegates free to disregard the will of their constituents; if they have them, they're also under no obligation to vote in line with the popular vote for Democratic candidate. And they can change their minds at any time up until the national convention in August.

On Thursday, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics released a report showing that Obama and Clinton have together contributed more than $900,000 to superdelegates' election campaigns in the last three years. The report showed that Obama's political action committee far outstripped Clinton's in donations. His PAC donated almost $700,000, while hers has donated almost $200,000.

MoveOn.org and the Obama camp argue that the elected delegates should vote in line with the will of their constituents. Earlier this week, MoveOn sent a note out to its 3.2 million members asking them to sign a petition to that effect. It's the first time the public has lobbied superdelegates to a convention, says Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia. "The public has never had reason to lobby them before."

Some congressional representatives are feeling torn between voting their own opinions as professional politicians, and voting as representatives of their districts. On Friday for example, The New York Times disclosed that Clinton endorser and civil rights leader congressman John Lewis of Georgia was reconsidering his support for Clinton because Obama had won Lewis' district.

The razor-thin margin between Obama and Clinton in the contest so far has made the superdelegates' influence a matter of intense public interest, but until recently, voters couldn't easily find the relevant information.

The blog DemConWatch, short for Democratic Convention Watch, was the first to start digging into the superdelegates. There, anonymous bloggers painstakingly compiled a list of superdelegates from press releases and statements in news articles. Site statistics show that it had 172,000 visits this week. One of the site administrators says that visitors come from the government and news agencies.

On Friday, DemConWatch announced that it is teaming up with the Superdelegate Transparency Project, a project of the progressive blogs OpenLeft and The Literary Outpost, and the staff at a Washington, D.C., nonprofit called the Sunlight Foundation. About 50 volunteers are contributing to the wiki, says Avelino Maestas, an editor at the Sunlight Foundation.

But William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a veteran of Democrat Walter Mondale's presidential campaign, thinks much of the alarm over the superdelegates' independence is unjustified.

"If one candidate has a clear and significant majority of the elected delegates, the superdelegates will not act to override that majority," he says. "They won't do it because they are political professionals and they know what acrimony and division that would create within the party."