24 ms·

Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

431 points by tonyztan 10y ago

coreyp_1 10y ago
Why does it ask for your address? Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list. Are they harvesting the address data for some reason?
- dangrossman 10y ago
  A zip code may span multiple counties, and the list includes local representatives. A zip code alone is not sufficient.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  A sysadmin of Politiwatch here (non-profit that made the site). We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious. Regardless, we ask for the address as well as zip because in many areas, a ZIP is not sufficient to gather detailed data, as an official may represent one part of a ZIP code and not another. Politiwatch, the non-profit that made WhoAreMyRepresentatives.org (https://politiwatch.org https://politiwatch.org), is purely public benefit. We're trying to promote government transparency and political fluency. Nothing nefarious going on here. You'll have to take my word for it, though. If you're still feeling paranoid (and rightly so), enter your neighbor's address.
  - dajohnson89 10y ago
    > If you're still feeling paranoid (and rightly so), enter your neighbor's address. Thanks for that idea. A simple yet effective solution that I hadn't thought of before.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Keep in mind you may be on the border of a district. Your neighbor and you may not be in the same district. Likely won't make a difference, but it may. Maybe check multiple neighbors.
      - chewyfruitloop 10y ago
        nothing like a nice honest bit of gerrymandering
        ytjohn 10y ago
        Eventually, they will be so efficient at gerrymandering that they will be able to redraw districts live as people register to vote.
  - tombrossman 10y ago
    > We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious. That's not the whole truth. While you may be deleting the submitted form values, your site uses a third-party tracking service which collects a range of visitor data[0] which is stored by that third party. Third-party tracking is useful and mainstream, but you should have a privacy policy and disclose the tracking in that policy. On a more positive note, your site has a solid A+ for HTTPS configuration on SSL Labs[1], so that's great to see. The only change I would make is to switch server_tokens to 'off'[2] so you aren't leaking the Nginx version number (but this is admittedly just a minor bit of security through obscurity). [0]https://clicky.com/terms https://clicky.com/terms [1]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepresentatives.org https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepre... [2]http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#server_tokens http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...
    - epoch_100 10y ago
      You clearly did your research. We'll put up a cookie notification soon. Also, we configured our analytics to not store the HTTP parameters 'address' and 'zip' (where the address is encoded), so I'm not lying when I say the addresses are "nuked." That said, we'll implement everything you have mentioned as soon as we feel its safe to be pushing out changes... the traffic right now is high and we don't want to mess anything up.
  - deftnerd 10y ago
    Would it be possible to provide this data, based on the address, via a JSON API? I had goals to eventually to build a site that was similar but also shows political leanings and term length and when the next election for that position was going to occur. The desire is to build the core of a grassroots "run for elected seats" web service.
- tarellel 10y ago
  I was able to pull up my representatives without putting in my address and only using my zipcode. I think it really depends on your state/county.
- creepydata 10y ago
  No, it's not. Zip codes have absolutely no bearing on government/political boundaries, they have more to do with which post office is closest. For example, my zip code growing up was shared between two different towns.
- alaskamiller 10y ago
  Districts are sometimes gerrymandered to cover different parts of the zip code.
  - ajdlinux 10y ago
    And indeed districts can be quite fairly distributed, rather than gerrymandered, in such a way that they cover different parts of a zip/post code area.
  - paveway 10y ago
    Although cyberwarfare and technological vulnerabilities that affect ballot collection and counting seem to be more potent than gerrymandering at this point, with modern elections. Gerrymandering probably still matters in swing states like Ohio and Florida, but only if modern tampering methods have been ruled out everywhere else.
    - jack9 10y ago
      > Gerrymandering probably still matters It matters everywhere in the US, down to the school district level (or whatever municipal granularity you like). This is orthogonal to tampering.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list." This is not even, sadly, close to true. In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes. While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions. We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ... In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed! This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty. Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much. (For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )
  - evan_ 10y ago
    Are there really districts that split apartment buildings by floor? How is that described by the text that sets the boundaries?
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      Often not intentionally, but in practice, yes. There are two cases, really. Where they intend to do it, they just draw the lines in 2d by lat/long or whatever, and if it goes through the middle of a building, oh well. The number of states still doing this is small -10 or less I believe. When they don't, you see cases like New York city, where they don't theoretically split by Apartment, but if you look at the official data, you discover addresses in the same apartment building have been given different voting districts or whatever (this happens for all political district types). This is quite common. Remember that they use the same data, so they give you wrong answers too (until you get it corrected)! For reps you just give a wrong answer or nothing if you can detect it, but for things like voting, you tell them to call their state or whatever, because you can't risk it.
- DrScump 10y ago
  Oh, yikes. It's much more complicated than that, especially to get localized offices and districts. I used to create voter data systems for candidates (clear back to when the data was available only on 9-track drives!), and it was quite a learning experience. CA, for example, has become so carefully gerrymandered that one of the buildings in my neighborhood is split between Assembly districts. It gets worse, or more detailed, anyway. Your city for your mailing address may not be your actual city of residence -- the true boundary is by real estate parcel. For example, there are many Los Gatos mailing addresses that are in Saratoga, or vice-versa, plus many that are on unincorporated (county) land. Mailing address "city" is assigned for the convenience of the Post Office and only roughly parallels actual political boundaries, which are always by parcel. So, you could differ from your CA neighbor in any of these respects: Assembly district Senate district Congressional district City (or none, if unincorporated parcel) County Supervisorial district City council district (for district cities, as opposed to at-large council cities). There have been other sites that gave this level of detail: - Project Vote Smart, which is still there but I can't find any tell-me-my-districs feature anymore, even after registering. - Smartvoter.org is still there, but it oddly wasn't updated for the 2016 General. You can tell your districts that were up for a given election by looking at that ballot, but I don't see a comprehensive way to see all of your districts there (any seat not on that particular ballot is omitted entirely).
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    > CA, for example, has become so carefully gerrymandered that one of the buildings in my neighborhood is split between Assembly districts. Is that still true now with the Citizens Redistricting Commission?
- nishs 10y ago
  Looking at the single-line input I assumed it was an email address field, not physical address. I feel so dumb.
cperciva 10y ago
I'm guessing the title was intended to have s/and out/and find out/ ?
- dang 10y ago
  I was kind of enjoying 'out' as the verb, but you're probably right. (Submitted title was 'Enter your address and out everyone who represents you in government'.)
  - cperciva 10y ago
    Indeed, I was musing on the question of "outing" politicians, but while interesting I don't think it was what was intended. :-)
rocky1138 10y ago
It's important to note that this is US only.
- iagooar 10y ago
  It's funny how it's always American who "forget" to mention that something is scoped to their country. I kind of always felt that given that their country is so vast, they must feel like there is nothing more out there, or at least it's not worth mentioning. I've found many, many American businesses trying to sell their product via ads or other kind of marketing, but "forgetting" to mention that they are US-only. I'm not trying to attack American people or something, it's just a personal (and probably very biased) observation that I've had.
  - chewyfruitloop 10y ago
    i work for a large US corporation, and also did in my last job (i'm in the UK) .... it seems to be a general thing to forget the US is not the only place people live in the world ... the majority of memo's we get spammed with are US centric and only applicable there. It seems to be a mind set in general thats pervasive in the staes.
- DrScump 10y ago
  ... hence the title referring specifically to "U.S. government".
  - Kiro 10y ago
    Pretty sure the title was changed.
- chewyfruitloop 10y ago
  i feel the obligatory insensitive clod response to be appropriate to this post.... or is that to slashdot for hacker news?
Proven 10y ago
LOL, yeah right they "represent" you. You wouldn't need that site if they did.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
wishinghand 10y ago
What's the source of the data once an address is submitted? I tried to do a similar project during a hackathon and all of the APIs I found were either dead or insufficient.
- dyscrete 10y ago
  My guess is it uses geolocation APIs to match city to politicians in your district. Maybe even looks up politicians phone numbers by area codes that belong to those cities. This is just a theory of course.
- Stratoscope 10y ago
  One API for this is Google's Civic Information API: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/ https://developers.google.com/civic-information/ The API has a representativeInfoQuery to list your elected representatives, and a voterInfoQuery for current election information. Details and examples are here: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/using_api https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/using_a... And this page discusses the quality and limitations of the data: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/data_guidelines https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/data_gu...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
11thEarlOfMar 10y ago
I'd like to see this expanded to show the full text, the representative's summary, and constituent comments for the bills, codes, policies, docket, whatever they are actually going to be voting on. Then, show how they voted.
- source99 10y ago
  That would be great. Maybe have it searchable in the other direction so I that I can find a specific piece of legislation based on a searching for a keyword and find out how my representatives voted.
- tfgg 10y ago
  > constituent comments for the bills In my experience, sites that do this sort of thing usually fail. They're ghost towns, and no-one cares what an unrepresentative sample of internet people think about bills. I'm not based in the US, but I think the other points are covered by sites like https://www.govtrack.us/ https://www.govtrack.us/. Open Congress was another, but was shut down when the Sunlight Foundation went a bit haywire.
DrScump 10y ago
Actually, this title doesn't do the service justice -- it yields detail clear down to local offices and gives a detail '+' link for each to get details like contact information. For example, this is what is returned for a given, random Sunnyvale, CA address; the lone change I would suggest is to have the county and then city offices listed last to maintain a sequence of decreasing granularity. Note that Sunnyvale is an example of at-large city council representation, so all are listed. Very nicely done! Barack Obama President of the United States Joseph R. Biden Vice-President of the United States Michael M. Honda United States House of Representatives CA-17 Dianne Feinstein United States Senate Barbara Boxer United States Senate Edmund G. Brown Jr. Governor Gavin Newsom Lieutenant Governor Laurie Smith Sheriff Lawrence E. Stone Assessor Jeffrey Rosen District Attorney Gustav Larsson City Council Member Seat 1 Glenn Hendricks City Council Member Seat 2 David Whittum City Council Member Seat 4 Pat Meyering City Council Member Seat 5 Jim Davis City Council Member Seat 6 Tara Martin-Milius City Council Member Seat 7 Jim Griffith Mayor and City Council Member Seat 3 John Chiang State Treasurer Kamala D. Harris Attorney General Betty T. Yee State Controller Alex Padilla Secretary of State Dave Jones Insurance Commissioner Tom Torlakson State Superintendent of Public Instruction
- saurik 10y ago
  > it yields detail clear down to local offices It has city councils, but it doesn't have any local districts. In Sunnyvale, you are also being represented on at least the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District[1], the El Camino Health Care District[2], and the Santa Clara Valley Water District[3]. If you are curious how I figured this out, I went to the Santa Clara County Local Agency Formation website, which has an interactive mapping tool[4]. [1] http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election-information http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election-information [2] https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance [3] http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx [4] http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps
  - mandelbulb 10y ago
    Why do so much work and post on HN instead of sending them a quick mail?
saurik 10y ago
This website believes the Auditor-Controller for Santa Barbara County is Robert Geis, but he retired last March and was replaced by Theodore A. Fallati. I also wouldn't say that it is fair to say that this is "everyone": it is missing all of the local special districts (such as the Goleta Water District and the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District) that I would argue are much more important to my life than the person who is currently the "Treasurer-Tax Collector-Public Admin." (someone I believe I have never actually met, despite having been extremely active in local politics for years and having run to be a County Supervisor, even now being elected to the board of a new district which will come into existence in March 2017).
- deathhand 10y ago
  Congratulations on the win. What was the most difficult thing about breaking into politics? Did you have a career beforehand? Thank you for your time and service.
  - saurik 10y ago
    Here is a talk I gave at a conference, 360|interesect (which focuses on what technologists do in their spare time "while away from the keyboard"), on some of my motivations; this was before I started actually running for offices, though. https://vimeo.com/126618332 https://vimeo.com/126618332
jzwinck 10y ago
I'm one of the millions of Americans living overseas. Who represents us?
- grzm 10y ago
  Depends on where you're registered to vote: https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-matters/benefits/voting.html https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...
- TillE 10y ago
  Usually just federal office holders relative to your last place of residence in the US. That's who you can vote for, anyway. Congressman, Senator, and President.
- tombrossman 10y ago
  You simply register to vote at the last voting district you resided in in the USA. Use your current overseas address. It is surprisingly easy, especially if you were already registered to vote there before. Now whether the politicians for that voting district will listen to you or help you is another question, but that's the same for most voters regardless of where they live.
chanandler_bong 10y ago
As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.
- grzm 10y ago
  The taxes you owe take this into account, don't they? You have benefits of being a US citizen regardless of where you live. Some may value this more than others. Weighing your options, you may want to consider changing your citizenship.
  - lokedhs 10y ago
    The US is one of very few countries who collect income tax from their overseas citizens.
    - chanandler_bong 10y ago
      There are only two; the US and Eritrea.
      - AnAfrican 10y ago
        yep (with few minor exemptions related to income from tax heavens) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individ... As a side note, the biggest difference seems to be how countries treat foreign income. Almost every country that has Income Taxes will tax any local income. But there's a lot of variance on what they do for foreign income.
  - tfgg 10y ago
    You're taxed like a resident by the US. A friend had their tax-free (in the UK) PhD stipend taxed by the US government. Other people can find themselves owing significant taxes on property sales in the UK, despite the transaction having absolutely nothing to do with the US government [1]. There are exemptions which are pretty low and clearly don't cover the above examples. Plus you still have to do the overly onerous reporting of all your bank accounts. Ultimately the winners are the accountants. It's not justified at all by services that the US does for overseas citizens, many countries do that without needing a draconian tax system for non-resident citizens. I think it sort of comes down to Americans believing that you must be up to something dodgy if you want to live in another country :) [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/boris-Johnson-renounces-us-citizenship-tax-bill-mayor-london/385554/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/bor...
fnj 10y ago
A technical tour de force, but the premise is flawed. "I" have no representatives. "We" have representatives as a group. The mob who rules by force of numbers; all strictly democratically acting. Right off the top, the president, VP, both senators, federal and state representative, governor, and lieutenant governor; every one of them is 100% useless to me personally, because not a single one of them shares even one tiny insignificant view that is important to me. Sure, hey, that's the breaks, but let's not pretend they represent me.
- igorigor 10y ago
  I can go to my local Rep's office or write a letter and will get a response that can get the ball rolling. Attitudes like yours creates cynicism and dwindles trust in local governments. Try going to your city council meeting, for once.
- fnj 10y ago
  The knee-jerk intolerant censors are out in force today, eh?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
mushmouth 10y ago
This would be really useful for other countries. since some of the info is hard to find.
jonknee 10y ago
Really useful, love the idea. There may be some data troubles though, I looked up myself and found that the Twitter link for Senator Maria Cantwell goes to a porn account, not her actual profile. Yikes!
- ytjohn 10y ago
  Today you have learned something new about your Senator.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  Whoops..... We'll get on fixing that.
source99 10y ago
I really don't understand this. Is the point so that I can tweet or mail letters to my elected officials? Is tweeting at officials supposed to help my station in life? Just seems ridiculous to me that tweeting would be taken seriously. I suppose it could be taken seriously but that would actually scare me more. I always believed that if you want to make a difference than vote with your wallet and I don't mean to donate money to politicians. I mean to make purchases from companies you respect.
- xenity7 10y ago
  Why is it ridiculous that tweeting would be taken seriously?Why would the form of communication matter? Elected representative "should" listen to their constituents by most definitions, and a tweet is just as valid a form of communication as any otherb- and hard to ignore because it is public.
  - source99 10y ago
    How would an elected official know the tweet actually came from a constituent? How would they know a yell or a letter came from a constituent?
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      A letter at least has a local USPS stamp on which postal office first received it.
- clort 10y ago
  > Just seems ridiculous to me that tweeting would be taken seriously. I would agree, though it seems that your president-elect would not..
- afarrell 10y ago
  If you have a problem like "the social security administration has been giving me the run-around and I can't get someone to actually look at my case", then your US Representative can in fact be super helpful. Unlike legislation, it is an opportunity for them to unambiguously help one of their constituents. Depending on the number of family/friends you tell about it, they can buy themselves 1-10 votes with probably just a phone call. Source: multiple anecdotes from acquaintances and threads on /r/legaladvice
2sk21 10y ago
Potentially very useful but it had incorrect names for the county level officials in my county. There does not seem to be any way to send in corrections.
andyfleming 10y ago
It would be nice to be able to expand the list view of this to print to a PDF.
jelder 10y ago
Severely inaccurate results for me. Gave me reps for CT but I live in MA. Edit: typo
- padobson 10y ago
  > Severely immaculate You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  One of the creators here. If you feel comfortable, we would appreciate it if you sent the address you used to secure@politiwatch.org so that we can fix the inaccuracies you are seeing. Thanks!
- losvedir 10y ago
  Maybe you were like me and assumed that the "address" input just meant street address, since there's a separate zip input? I did that (#### lawrence st) and then it interpreted my street address to be in a different state. Instead you need to put in your address including city and state. I'm not actually sure what the zip code input is for.
protomyth 10y ago
It would be nice if sites like this started taking into account Tribal governments. Otherwise, nice and simple website.
padobson 10y ago
I got my list and was pleased to see things like Auditor and Coroner, but why no state senator or state representative? There's also no judicial branch to be found, which may not matter much for the Federal Supreme Court, because they're appointed, but just about every jurisdiction I fall under, State Supreme, State Appeals, Local Criminal, Local family, has an elected judge. Judges tend to be a major source of ballot fatigue, because nobody knows who they are. You could argue that's a good thing, because then only informed voters are selecting them, but you could also argue that it's a bad thing, because only the self-interested are voting for them.
- rbcgerard 10y ago
  Yeah, also does have all the other elected officials for districts (school, fire, etc.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- camiller 10y ago
  Coroner is an elected position where you live? At any rate, I did get my state senator and mayor, but no city council rep. Around here judges are not elected, but we do vote to remove or retain judges. Generally every year there will be one or two that someone is campaigning to have removed.
  - padobson 10y ago
    >Coroner is an elected position where you live? Sure is. I heard an anecdote through a common friend that a past coroner, who wasn't personally political, was running for office. My friend, a Republican, asked why the coroner was running as a Democrat. The coroner replied, "Because this is Trumbull County and I want to be coroner." Anywho, it's often an uncontested race, as it was in 2016: http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf
tonetheman 10y ago
Very cool.
ch 10y ago
Funny. The results keep coming back empty for me.
creepydata 10y ago
Not everyone, doesn't show my mayor or city council.
joelcollinsdc 10y ago
Looks like this API does a lot of the heavy lifting for this: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/ https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/
- epoch_100 10y ago
  Yes, that's one of our primary data sources. We're working on leaving it, however, because we're also Google-phobes.
  - jedimastert 10y ago
    That, and you've exceed the request limit and it's only 10am cst
    - epoch_100 10y ago
      It's an honor. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.
  - joelcollinsdc 10y ago
    I looked at it years ago and found some weird gaps, where certain addresses would return nothing. What are you replacing it with?
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      Most weird gaps used to be areas where we detected the data we had conflicted. In those cases, rather then give possibly wrong answers, it says nothing
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    I truly wish you luck on that. I hope you can succeed in opening up this kind of data. It tends to be a very tough road to hoe
epoch_100 10y ago
To everyone posting here: I am a creator of this service. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email secure@politiwatch.org! We're extremely encouraged by all the positive feedback here, and we're glad to provide a service that you all found helpful.
- eamann 10y ago
  I think the service is awesome ... but why the "enter your email address" part? You can locate people just by zipcode (and omitting the email still works). What are you using our addresses for? What is your privacy policy? Why ask for nonessential information in the first place?
  - zackkitzmiller 10y ago
    It asks for address (not email address) to better locate your local representatives.
  - epoch_100 10y ago
    It doesn't ask for your email address, just your home address and your ZIP code. It's not unessential information. To quote DannyBee, who answered this same question below: >"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list." >This is not even, sadly, close to true. In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes. >While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions. >We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ... In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed! >This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty. >Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much. >(For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )
dsalzman 10y ago
Feature Request: Add a picture of the representative when you use + to drill down. It's nice to attach a face to a name.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  Already implemented for most high-level representatives ;) Check Obama for an example.
  - dsalzman 10y ago
    Great! I was only looking at the local state reps when I tested with my address. Crowd sourcing them from select users could be a fast method.
throwaway2016a 10y ago
Impressive. It even had my Registry of Deeds. Although it did list some people from other districts. I'm from New Hampshire and it showed all our Executive Council even the ones not in my district.[1] [1] In New Hampshire if the Governor is the Chairman of the Board the executive council is like the directors on the board.
briankwest 10y ago
Data is stale, My uncle Ronnie was killed three years ago, and they still have him listed. /b
Tau_Zero 10y ago
Sounds like an awesome service. Unfortunately, I'm seeing: Error 403 Daily Limit Exceeded. The quota will be reset at midnight Pacific Time (PT). You may monitor your quota usage and adjust limits in the API Console: https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/civicinfo/quotas?project=324870654357 https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/civicinfo/quo...
- jamisteven 10y ago
  Same.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  We reached out to Google, and they increased our quota. Try now!
  - ada1981 10y ago
    A good opportunity for you to include a "donate now" button when the service is down :)
jamisteven 10y ago
Site is down.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  ...and site is back up. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.
mdc2161 10y ago
If you like whoaremyrepresentatives, we would love feedback on [Act On This](https://www.actonthis.org/ https://www.actonthis.org/) as well. We don't go down to as local of a level yet, but are more focused on giving information about specific actions you can take related to issues you care about. While the current list of issues comes from us, we're on-boarding a couple of non-profits so they can use the tool to help organize volunteers at a state and local level.
jedbrown 10y ago
Cool service. Beware that the Wikipedia links may direct to different people with the same name, particularly for local offices. For example, my Assessor links to a British wartime codebreaker and my Surveyor links to a Kiwi rugby star.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Fantastic service. Should it then link to their position all the top issues, like for, against, or refuses to commit? By the way, my address has 30 people, all the same color.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  That would be an interesting continuation of the site... we will look into it. And as for all your reps being the same color, funny how democracy works out like that...
  - CodeWriter23 10y ago
    I'd say also deep linking into followthemoney.org would help more thoroughly explore a politician's alignment on issues.
cpeterso 10y ago
The site could use geolocation (server and/or client side) to prepopulate users' location for a zero-click user experience. The site could also specify a numeric input type for the zip code field so mobile browsers will display the numeric keypad instead of the alphabetic keyboard.
Larrikin 10y ago
The feature I've been looking for but can't seem to find is a calendar view of when your elected officials are up for election. Virginia for example holds their major state elections the year after Presidential elections. Local elections come up at seemingly random times. I vote absentee and remember coming home for a visit and my parents asking me to vote in some small election that was being held in the middle of summer. Being able to add all of the offices to my calendar, ideally with important deadlines like when you can apply for absentee, vote early, and when you have to have your ballot in by would be amazing.
- doubt_me 10y ago
  I am not sure why this page isn't loading but I think this use to be something close to what your talking about https://openstates.org/ https://openstates.org/
ryao 10y ago
I wanted to find out who my representatives were to discuss the state of internet connectivity in my area. This made the research easy. :)
tunesmith 10y ago
If you guys have all this information, I would love to see a breakdown by subject, for instance, all the elected positions that have something to do with managing elections, and their next election date (so I know who to donate money to if I want to maximize health of elections nationwide).
Pigo 10y ago
Brought to you by the left-wing preachy makers of BibleOrQuran
ada1981 10y ago
this should be an official .gov website
NatashaA 10y ago
My boyfriend of two years left me for another girl because I accuse him of seeing another girl and since then I have been trying to get him but he refuse to come back to me, he was not responding to my call or email and he even unfriend me on facebook and he told me that he is done with me. I was searching on the internet for help and i saw a testimony of how a spell caster help them to get their ex back. So I decided to give it a try and I contacted him and I explained my problems to him and he cast a love spell for me and guarantee me of 3 days that my ex will come back to me and to my greatest surprise the third day a great miracle fell on me and my ex came back to me on the third day and he begged me for forgiveness. LUKASMORALOVESPELL@GMAIL.COM or LUKASMORALOVESPELL@YAHOO.COM, I will continue to publish his name because he is my Savior and we are happily married now. If you need him to help you Email him today on: LUKASMORALOVESPELL@GMAIL.COM or LUKASMORALOVESPELL@YAHOO.COM

431 points by tonyztan 10y ago

Why does it ask for your address? Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list. Are they harvesting the address data for some reason?

dangrossman 10y ago
A zip code may span multiple counties, and the list includes local representatives. A zip code alone is not sufficient.
epoch_100 10y ago
A sysadmin of Politiwatch here (non-profit that made the site). We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious. Regardless, we ask for the address as well as zip because in many areas, a ZIP is not sufficient to gather detailed data, as an official may represent one part of a ZIP code and not another. Politiwatch, the non-profit that made WhoAreMyRepresentatives.org (https://politiwatch.org https://politiwatch.org), is purely public benefit. We're trying to promote government transparency and political fluency. Nothing nefarious going on here. You'll have to take my word for it, though. If you're still feeling paranoid (and rightly so), enter your neighbor's address.
- dajohnson89 10y ago
  > If you're still feeling paranoid (and rightly so), enter your neighbor's address. Thanks for that idea. A simple yet effective solution that I hadn't thought of before.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Keep in mind you may be on the border of a district. Your neighbor and you may not be in the same district. Likely won't make a difference, but it may. Maybe check multiple neighbors.
    - chewyfruitloop 10y ago
      nothing like a nice honest bit of gerrymandering
      - ytjohn 10y ago
        Eventually, they will be so efficient at gerrymandering that they will be able to redraw districts live as people register to vote.
- tombrossman 10y ago
  > We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious. That's not the whole truth. While you may be deleting the submitted form values, your site uses a third-party tracking service which collects a range of visitor data[0] which is stored by that third party. Third-party tracking is useful and mainstream, but you should have a privacy policy and disclose the tracking in that policy. On a more positive note, your site has a solid A+ for HTTPS configuration on SSL Labs[1], so that's great to see. The only change I would make is to switch server_tokens to 'off'[2] so you aren't leaking the Nginx version number (but this is admittedly just a minor bit of security through obscurity). [0]https://clicky.com/terms https://clicky.com/terms [1]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepresentatives.org https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepre... [2]http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#server_tokens http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...
  - epoch_100 10y ago
    You clearly did your research. We'll put up a cookie notification soon. Also, we configured our analytics to not store the HTTP parameters 'address' and 'zip' (where the address is encoded), so I'm not lying when I say the addresses are "nuked." That said, we'll implement everything you have mentioned as soon as we feel its safe to be pushing out changes... the traffic right now is high and we don't want to mess anything up.
- deftnerd 10y ago
  Would it be possible to provide this data, based on the address, via a JSON API? I had goals to eventually to build a site that was similar but also shows political leanings and term length and when the next election for that position was going to occur. The desire is to build the core of a grassroots "run for elected seats" web service.
tarellel 10y ago
I was able to pull up my representatives without putting in my address and only using my zipcode. I think it really depends on your state/county.
creepydata 10y ago
No, it's not. Zip codes have absolutely no bearing on government/political boundaries, they have more to do with which post office is closest. For example, my zip code growing up was shared between two different towns.
alaskamiller 10y ago
Districts are sometimes gerrymandered to cover different parts of the zip code.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  And indeed districts can be quite fairly distributed, rather than gerrymandered, in such a way that they cover different parts of a zip/post code area.
- paveway 10y ago
  Although cyberwarfare and technological vulnerabilities that affect ballot collection and counting seem to be more potent than gerrymandering at this point, with modern elections. Gerrymandering probably still matters in swing states like Ohio and Florida, but only if modern tampering methods have been ruled out everywhere else.
  - jack9 10y ago
    > Gerrymandering probably still matters It matters everywhere in the US, down to the school district level (or whatever municipal granularity you like). This is orthogonal to tampering.
DannyBee 10y ago
"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list." This is not even, sadly, close to true. In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes. While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions. We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ... In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed! This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty. Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much. (For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )
- evan_ 10y ago
  Are there really districts that split apartment buildings by floor? How is that described by the text that sets the boundaries?
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    Often not intentionally, but in practice, yes. There are two cases, really. Where they intend to do it, they just draw the lines in 2d by lat/long or whatever, and if it goes through the middle of a building, oh well. The number of states still doing this is small -10 or less I believe. When they don't, you see cases like New York city, where they don't theoretically split by Apartment, but if you look at the official data, you discover addresses in the same apartment building have been given different voting districts or whatever (this happens for all political district types). This is quite common. Remember that they use the same data, so they give you wrong answers too (until you get it corrected)! For reps you just give a wrong answer or nothing if you can detect it, but for things like voting, you tell them to call their state or whatever, because you can't risk it.
DrScump 10y ago
Oh, yikes. It's much more complicated than that, especially to get localized offices and districts. I used to create voter data systems for candidates (clear back to when the data was available only on 9-track drives!), and it was quite a learning experience. CA, for example, has become so carefully gerrymandered that one of the buildings in my neighborhood is split between Assembly districts. It gets worse, or more detailed, anyway. Your city for your mailing address may not be your actual city of residence -- the true boundary is by real estate parcel. For example, there are many Los Gatos mailing addresses that are in Saratoga, or vice-versa, plus many that are on unincorporated (county) land. Mailing address "city" is assigned for the convenience of the Post Office and only roughly parallels actual political boundaries, which are always by parcel. So, you could differ from your CA neighbor in any of these respects: Assembly district Senate district Congressional district City (or none, if unincorporated parcel) County Supervisorial district City council district (for district cities, as opposed to at-large council cities). There have been other sites that gave this level of detail: - Project Vote Smart, which is still there but I can't find any tell-me-my-districs feature anymore, even after registering. - Smartvoter.org is still there, but it oddly wasn't updated for the 2016 General. You can tell your districts that were up for a given election by looking at that ballot, but I don't see a comprehensive way to see all of your districts there (any seat not on that particular ballot is omitted entirely).
- pcwalton 10y ago
  > CA, for example, has become so carefully gerrymandered that one of the buildings in my neighborhood is split between Assembly districts. Is that still true now with the Citizens Redistricting Commission?
nishs 10y ago
Looking at the single-line input I assumed it was an email address field, not physical address. I feel so dumb.

cperciva 10y ago

I'm guessing the title was intended to have s/and out/and find out/ ?

dang 10y ago
I was kind of enjoying 'out' as the verb, but you're probably right. (Submitted title was 'Enter your address and out everyone who represents you in government'.)
- cperciva 10y ago
  Indeed, I was musing on the question of "outing" politicians, but while interesting I don't think it was what was intended. :-)

rocky1138 10y ago

It's important to note that this is US only.

iagooar 10y ago
It's funny how it's always American who "forget" to mention that something is scoped to their country. I kind of always felt that given that their country is so vast, they must feel like there is nothing more out there, or at least it's not worth mentioning. I've found many, many American businesses trying to sell their product via ads or other kind of marketing, but "forgetting" to mention that they are US-only. I'm not trying to attack American people or something, it's just a personal (and probably very biased) observation that I've had.
- chewyfruitloop 10y ago
  i work for a large US corporation, and also did in my last job (i'm in the UK) .... it seems to be a general thing to forget the US is not the only place people live in the world ... the majority of memo's we get spammed with are US centric and only applicable there. It seems to be a mind set in general thats pervasive in the staes.
DrScump 10y ago
... hence the title referring specifically to "U.S. government".
- Kiro 10y ago
  Pretty sure the title was changed.
chewyfruitloop 10y ago
i feel the obligatory insensitive clod response to be appropriate to this post.... or is that to slashdot for hacker news?

Proven 10y ago

LOL, yeah right they "represent" you. You wouldn't need that site if they did.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

wishinghand 10y ago

What's the source of the data once an address is submitted? I tried to do a similar project during a hackathon and all of the APIs I found were either dead or insufficient.

dyscrete 10y ago
My guess is it uses geolocation APIs to match city to politicians in your district. Maybe even looks up politicians phone numbers by area codes that belong to those cities. This is just a theory of course.
Stratoscope 10y ago
One API for this is Google's Civic Information API: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/ https://developers.google.com/civic-information/ The API has a representativeInfoQuery to list your elected representatives, and a voterInfoQuery for current election information. Details and examples are here: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/using_api https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/using_a... And this page discusses the quality and limitations of the data: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/data_guidelines https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/data_gu...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

11thEarlOfMar 10y ago

I'd like to see this expanded to show the full text, the representative's summary, and constituent comments for the bills, codes, policies, docket, whatever they are actually going to be voting on. Then, show how they voted.

source99 10y ago
That would be great. Maybe have it searchable in the other direction so I that I can find a specific piece of legislation based on a searching for a keyword and find out how my representatives voted.
tfgg 10y ago
> constituent comments for the bills In my experience, sites that do this sort of thing usually fail. They're ghost towns, and no-one cares what an unrepresentative sample of internet people think about bills. I'm not based in the US, but I think the other points are covered by sites like https://www.govtrack.us/ https://www.govtrack.us/. Open Congress was another, but was shut down when the Sunlight Foundation went a bit haywire.

DrScump 10y ago

Actually, this title doesn't do the service justice -- it yields detail clear down to local offices and gives a detail '+' link for each to get details like contact information. For example, this is what is returned for a given, random Sunnyvale, CA address; the lone change I would suggest is to have the county and then city offices listed last to maintain a sequence of decreasing granularity. Note that Sunnyvale is an example of at-large city council representation, so all are listed. Very nicely done! Barack Obama President of the United States Joseph R. Biden Vice-President of the United States Michael M. Honda United States House of Representatives CA-17 Dianne Feinstein United States Senate Barbara Boxer United States Senate Edmund G. Brown Jr. Governor Gavin Newsom Lieutenant Governor Laurie Smith Sheriff Lawrence E. Stone Assessor Jeffrey Rosen District Attorney Gustav Larsson City Council Member Seat 1 Glenn Hendricks City Council Member Seat 2 David Whittum City Council Member Seat 4 Pat Meyering City Council Member Seat 5 Jim Davis City Council Member Seat 6 Tara Martin-Milius City Council Member Seat 7 Jim Griffith Mayor and City Council Member Seat 3 John Chiang State Treasurer Kamala D. Harris Attorney General Betty T. Yee State Controller Alex Padilla Secretary of State Dave Jones Insurance Commissioner Tom Torlakson State Superintendent of Public Instruction

saurik 10y ago
> it yields detail clear down to local offices It has city councils, but it doesn't have any local districts. In Sunnyvale, you are also being represented on at least the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District[1], the El Camino Health Care District[2], and the Santa Clara Valley Water District[3]. If you are curious how I figured this out, I went to the Santa Clara County Local Agency Formation website, which has an interactive mapping tool[4]. [1] http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election-information http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election-information [2] https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance [3] http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx [4] http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps
- mandelbulb 10y ago
  Why do so much work and post on HN instead of sending them a quick mail?

saurik 10y ago

This website believes the Auditor-Controller for Santa Barbara County is Robert Geis, but he retired last March and was replaced by Theodore A. Fallati. I also wouldn't say that it is fair to say that this is "everyone": it is missing all of the local special districts (such as the Goleta Water District and the Isla Vista Recreation and Park District) that I would argue are much more important to my life than the person who is currently the "Treasurer-Tax Collector-Public Admin." (someone I believe I have never actually met, despite having been extremely active in local politics for years and having run to be a County Supervisor, even now being elected to the board of a new district which will come into existence in March 2017).

deathhand 10y ago
Congratulations on the win. What was the most difficult thing about breaking into politics? Did you have a career beforehand? Thank you for your time and service.
- saurik 10y ago
  Here is a talk I gave at a conference, 360|interesect (which focuses on what technologists do in their spare time "while away from the keyboard"), on some of my motivations; this was before I started actually running for offices, though. https://vimeo.com/126618332 https://vimeo.com/126618332

jzwinck 10y ago

I'm one of the millions of Americans living overseas. Who represents us?

grzm 10y ago
Depends on where you're registered to vote: https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-matters/benefits/voting.html https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...
TillE 10y ago
Usually just federal office holders relative to your last place of residence in the US. That's who you can vote for, anyway. Congressman, Senator, and President.
tombrossman 10y ago
You simply register to vote at the last voting district you resided in in the USA. Use your current overseas address. It is surprisingly easy, especially if you were already registered to vote there before. Now whether the politicians for that voting district will listen to you or help you is another question, but that's the same for most voters regardless of where they live.

chanandler_bong 10y ago

As a US citizen living abroad, I have no representatives. This, as I am getting ready to file my US income taxes for which I receive no benefits or representation.

grzm 10y ago
The taxes you owe take this into account, don't they? You have benefits of being a US citizen regardless of where you live. Some may value this more than others. Weighing your options, you may want to consider changing your citizenship.
- lokedhs 10y ago
  The US is one of very few countries who collect income tax from their overseas citizens.
  - chanandler_bong 10y ago
    There are only two; the US and Eritrea.
    - AnAfrican 10y ago
      yep (with few minor exemptions related to income from tax heavens) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individuals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individ... As a side note, the biggest difference seems to be how countries treat foreign income. Almost every country that has Income Taxes will tax any local income. But there's a lot of variance on what they do for foreign income.
- tfgg 10y ago
  You're taxed like a resident by the US. A friend had their tax-free (in the UK) PhD stipend taxed by the US government. Other people can find themselves owing significant taxes on property sales in the UK, despite the transaction having absolutely nothing to do with the US government [1]. There are exemptions which are pretty low and clearly don't cover the above examples. Plus you still have to do the overly onerous reporting of all your bank accounts. Ultimately the winners are the accountants. It's not justified at all by services that the US does for overseas citizens, many countries do that without needing a draconian tax system for non-resident citizens. I think it sort of comes down to Americans believing that you must be up to something dodgy if you want to live in another country :) [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/boris-Johnson-renounces-us-citizenship-tax-bill-mayor-london/385554/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/bor...

fnj 10y ago

A technical tour de force, but the premise is flawed. "I" have no representatives. "We" have representatives as a group. The mob who rules by force of numbers; all strictly democratically acting. Right off the top, the president, VP, both senators, federal and state representative, governor, and lieutenant governor; every one of them is 100% useless to me personally, because not a single one of them shares even one tiny insignificant view that is important to me. Sure, hey, that's the breaks, but let's not pretend they represent me.

igorigor 10y ago
I can go to my local Rep's office or write a letter and will get a response that can get the ball rolling. Attitudes like yours creates cynicism and dwindles trust in local governments. Try going to your city council meeting, for once.
fnj 10y ago
The knee-jerk intolerant censors are out in force today, eh?
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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mushmouth 10y ago

This would be really useful for other countries. since some of the info is hard to find.

jonknee 10y ago

Really useful, love the idea. There may be some data troubles though, I looked up myself and found that the Twitter link for Senator Maria Cantwell goes to a porn account, not her actual profile. Yikes!

ytjohn 10y ago
Today you have learned something new about your Senator.
epoch_100 10y ago
Whoops..... We'll get on fixing that.

source99 10y ago

I really don't understand this. Is the point so that I can tweet or mail letters to my elected officials? Is tweeting at officials supposed to help my station in life? Just seems ridiculous to me that tweeting would be taken seriously. I suppose it could be taken seriously but that would actually scare me more. I always believed that if you want to make a difference than vote with your wallet and I don't mean to donate money to politicians. I mean to make purchases from companies you respect.

xenity7 10y ago
Why is it ridiculous that tweeting would be taken seriously?Why would the form of communication matter? Elected representative "should" listen to their constituents by most definitions, and a tweet is just as valid a form of communication as any otherb- and hard to ignore because it is public.
- source99 10y ago
  How would an elected official know the tweet actually came from a constituent? How would they know a yell or a letter came from a constituent?
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    A letter at least has a local USPS stamp on which postal office first received it.
clort 10y ago
> Just seems ridiculous to me that tweeting would be taken seriously. I would agree, though it seems that your president-elect would not..
afarrell 10y ago
If you have a problem like "the social security administration has been giving me the run-around and I can't get someone to actually look at my case", then your US Representative can in fact be super helpful. Unlike legislation, it is an opportunity for them to unambiguously help one of their constituents. Depending on the number of family/friends you tell about it, they can buy themselves 1-10 votes with probably just a phone call. Source: multiple anecdotes from acquaintances and threads on /r/legaladvice

2sk21 10y ago

Potentially very useful but it had incorrect names for the county level officials in my county. There does not seem to be any way to send in corrections.

andyfleming 10y ago

It would be nice to be able to expand the list view of this to print to a PDF.

jelder 10y ago

Severely inaccurate results for me. Gave me reps for CT but I live in MA. Edit: typo

padobson 10y ago
> Severely immaculate You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
epoch_100 10y ago
One of the creators here. If you feel comfortable, we would appreciate it if you sent the address you used to secure@politiwatch.org so that we can fix the inaccuracies you are seeing. Thanks!
losvedir 10y ago
Maybe you were like me and assumed that the "address" input just meant street address, since there's a separate zip input? I did that (#### lawrence st) and then it interpreted my street address to be in a different state. Instead you need to put in your address including city and state. I'm not actually sure what the zip code input is for.

protomyth 10y ago

It would be nice if sites like this started taking into account Tribal governments. Otherwise, nice and simple website.

padobson 10y ago

I got my list and was pleased to see things like Auditor and Coroner, but why no state senator or state representative? There's also no judicial branch to be found, which may not matter much for the Federal Supreme Court, because they're appointed, but just about every jurisdiction I fall under, State Supreme, State Appeals, Local Criminal, Local family, has an elected judge. Judges tend to be a major source of ballot fatigue, because nobody knows who they are. You could argue that's a good thing, because then only informed voters are selecting them, but you could also argue that it's a bad thing, because only the self-interested are voting for them.

rbcgerard 10y ago
Yeah, also does have all the other elected officials for districts (school, fire, etc.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
camiller 10y ago
Coroner is an elected position where you live? At any rate, I did get my state senator and mayor, but no city council rep. Around here judges are not elected, but we do vote to remove or retain judges. Generally every year there will be one or two that someone is campaigning to have removed.
- padobson 10y ago
  >Coroner is an elected position where you live? Sure is. I heard an anecdote through a common friend that a past coroner, who wasn't personally political, was running for office. My friend, a Republican, asked why the coroner was running as a Democrat. The coroner replied, "Because this is Trumbull County and I want to be coroner." Anywho, it's often an uncontested race, as it was in 2016: http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf

tonetheman 10y ago

Very cool.

ch 10y ago

Funny. The results keep coming back empty for me.

creepydata 10y ago

Not everyone, doesn't show my mayor or city council.

joelcollinsdc 10y ago

Looks like this API does a lot of the heavy lifting for this: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/ https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/

epoch_100 10y ago
Yes, that's one of our primary data sources. We're working on leaving it, however, because we're also Google-phobes.
- jedimastert 10y ago
  That, and you've exceed the request limit and it's only 10am cst
  - epoch_100 10y ago
    It's an honor. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.
- joelcollinsdc 10y ago
  I looked at it years ago and found some weird gaps, where certain addresses would return nothing. What are you replacing it with?
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    Most weird gaps used to be areas where we detected the data we had conflicted. In those cases, rather then give possibly wrong answers, it says nothing
- DannyBee 10y ago
  I truly wish you luck on that. I hope you can succeed in opening up this kind of data. It tends to be a very tough road to hoe

epoch_100 10y ago

To everyone posting here: I am a creator of this service. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email secure@politiwatch.org! We're extremely encouraged by all the positive feedback here, and we're glad to provide a service that you all found helpful.

eamann 10y ago
I think the service is awesome ... but why the "enter your email address" part? You can locate people just by zipcode (and omitting the email still works). What are you using our addresses for? What is your privacy policy? Why ask for nonessential information in the first place?
- zackkitzmiller 10y ago
  It asks for address (not email address) to better locate your local representatives.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  It doesn't ask for your email address, just your home address and your ZIP code. It's not unessential information. To quote DannyBee, who answered this same question below: >"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list." >This is not even, sadly, close to true. In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes. >While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions. >We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ... In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed! >This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty. >Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much. >(For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )

dsalzman 10y ago

Feature Request: Add a picture of the representative when you use + to drill down. It's nice to attach a face to a name.

epoch_100 10y ago
Already implemented for most high-level representatives ;) Check Obama for an example.
- dsalzman 10y ago
  Great! I was only looking at the local state reps when I tested with my address. Crowd sourcing them from select users could be a fast method.

throwaway2016a 10y ago

Impressive. It even had my Registry of Deeds. Although it did list some people from other districts. I'm from New Hampshire and it showed all our Executive Council even the ones not in my district.[1] [1] In New Hampshire if the Governor is the Chairman of the Board the executive council is like the directors on the board.

briankwest 10y ago

Data is stale, My uncle Ronnie was killed three years ago, and they still have him listed. /b

Tau_Zero 10y ago

Sounds like an awesome service. Unfortunately, I'm seeing: Error 403 Daily Limit Exceeded. The quota will be reset at midnight Pacific Time (PT). You may monitor your quota usage and adjust limits in the API Console: https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/civicinfo/quotas?project=324870654357 https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/civicinfo/quo...

jamisteven 10y ago
Same.
epoch_100 10y ago
We reached out to Google, and they increased our quota. Try now!
- ada1981 10y ago
  A good opportunity for you to include a "donate now" button when the service is down :)

jamisteven 10y ago

Site is down.

epoch_100 10y ago
...and site is back up. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.

mdc2161 10y ago

If you like whoaremyrepresentatives, we would love feedback on [Act On This](https://www.actonthis.org/ https://www.actonthis.org/) as well. We don't go down to as local of a level yet, but are more focused on giving information about specific actions you can take related to issues you care about. While the current list of issues comes from us, we're on-boarding a couple of non-profits so they can use the tool to help organize volunteers at a state and local level.

jedbrown 10y ago

Cool service. Beware that the Wikipedia links may direct to different people with the same name, particularly for local offices. For example, my Assessor links to a British wartime codebreaker and my Surveyor links to a Kiwi rugby star.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Fantastic service. Should it then link to their position all the top issues, like for, against, or refuses to commit? By the way, my address has 30 people, all the same color.

epoch_100 10y ago
That would be an interesting continuation of the site... we will look into it. And as for all your reps being the same color, funny how democracy works out like that...
- CodeWriter23 10y ago
  I'd say also deep linking into followthemoney.org would help more thoroughly explore a politician's alignment on issues.

cpeterso 10y ago

The site could use geolocation (server and/or client side) to prepopulate users' location for a zero-click user experience. The site could also specify a numeric input type for the zip code field so mobile browsers will display the numeric keypad instead of the alphabetic keyboard.

Larrikin 10y ago

The feature I've been looking for but can't seem to find is a calendar view of when your elected officials are up for election. Virginia for example holds their major state elections the year after Presidential elections. Local elections come up at seemingly random times. I vote absentee and remember coming home for a visit and my parents asking me to vote in some small election that was being held in the middle of summer. Being able to add all of the offices to my calendar, ideally with important deadlines like when you can apply for absentee, vote early, and when you have to have your ballot in by would be amazing.

doubt_me 10y ago
I am not sure why this page isn't loading but I think this use to be something close to what your talking about https://openstates.org/ https://openstates.org/

ryao 10y ago

I wanted to find out who my representatives were to discuss the state of internet connectivity in my area. This made the research easy. :)

tunesmith 10y ago

If you guys have all this information, I would love to see a breakdown by subject, for instance, all the elected positions that have something to do with managing elections, and their next election date (so I know who to donate money to if I want to maximize health of elections nationwide).

Pigo 10y ago

Brought to you by the left-wing preachy makers of BibleOrQuran

ada1981 10y ago

this should be an official .gov website

NatashaA 10y ago

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