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

whoaremyrepresentatives.org

71–80 of 167 posts

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

#71

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.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing for the ACA individual mandate? I moved abroad in the middle of this year and cancelled my US health insurance when I became eligible for NHS care. I'm realising now that there isn't a way to get a 1095-B from a government-run healthcare system that isn't in the US. Should I just pay the penalty for not having health insurance in the UK?

Forgive my ignorance but why is there a penalty and who is it due to?

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

#72
post #28
post #25

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…

> 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…

Why do so much work and post on HN instead of sending them a quick mail?

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

#73
post #25

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…

If I'm ever pulled over in Sunnyvale (or anywhere) I can do a quick search with this site and then yell at the cop, "I pay your boss, Laurie Smith's salary!"

Then it's just a quick jump over to the ACLU's Know Your Rights page...

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights

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

#74
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

A letter at least has a local USPS stamp on which postal office first received it.

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

#76
post #2

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?

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 WhoAreMyRe…

> 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

[1]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepre...

[2]http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...

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

#78
post #29

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

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.

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

#79
post #29

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

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.

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