What if there was a non-partisan instrument that granted party affiliations to candidates based upon their speeches, votes, donors, etc? If this instrument was able to do so in an effective manner, these assigned affiliations could become informative, drawing distinctions where the two parties would like them obscured. I am not sure how this instrument would be best designed. However, it would be interesting to be able to look at a list of candidates, and see how they fell upon a political spectrum that wasn't of their choosing, but a result of their actions and words.
I think it's a much more difficult task, that probably couldn't be performed by one person alone. The problem that such an effort would invariably suffer from, is that a large block of constituents might not agree with the affiliations, whatever they might be. It's tough to disagree with Nate Silver's predictions when he is demonstrably correct, however there would be no way to validate these affiliations. Maybe an open-source software that just made assignments based on the data would work.
I read candidates stances on various issues and take a look at their previous background, seems like the minimum validation needed for me to vote for a candidate. For things like judicial elections I never vote for the guy who has an endorsment from the prosecutors or the police union.