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Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
11–20 of 167 posts
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#12Why 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?
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.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#13Why 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?
Districts are sometimes gerrymandered to cover different parts of the zip code.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#14What'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.
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.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#15Why 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?
Districts are sometimes gerrymandered to cover different parts of the zip code.
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.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#16What'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.
One API for this is Google's Civic Information API:
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_a...
And this page discusses the quality and limitations of the data:
https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/data_gu...
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#17Why 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?
Districts are sometimes gerrymandered to cover different parts of the zip code.
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.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#18I'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.
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#19Why 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?
"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 )
Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Districts are sometimes gerrymandered to cover different parts of the zip code.
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.
> 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.