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

whoaremyrepresentatives.org

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

#111
post #110

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.

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?

It asks for address (not email address) to better locate your local representatives.

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

#112
post #110

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.

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?

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 )

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

#113
post #75

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

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!

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

#115

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.

This is amazing. Is there anyway to pull in opposing candidates during elections? I had a huge issue finding information on each side during the last election.

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

#116

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

Yes, that's one of our primary data sources. We're working on leaving it, however, because we're also Google-phobes.

That, and you've exceed the request limit and it's only 10am cst

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

#117

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.

I'm just getting a "quota exceeded" error when entering my address.

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

#118
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/quo...

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

#119

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.

I get a 403 error, you've exceeded your quota.

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

#120

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.

I hope you consider greatly expanding the scope of what this service does.

Someone needs to take a new approach to educating citizens about issues in an objective, non-biased manner.

Democracy is in a really poor state imho, things like this are what's needed to repair it.

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