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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

#141

Post by brudgers »

epoch_100 wrote: post #97

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.

It might make sense to list officials in a different order. The utility of the top answer, POTUS, is probably lower than the county commissioner or State Agricultural Tsar or Utilities Poobah.

Maybe a multi-column layout? Anyway, nice work.

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

#142

Post by DannyBee »

joelcollinsdc wrote: post #131
epoch_100 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I looked at it years ago and found some weird gaps, where certain addresses would return nothing. What are you replacing it with?

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

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

#143

Post by DannyBee »

epoch_100 wrote: post #98
joelcollinsdc wrote: post #89

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.

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

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

#144

Post by DannyBee »

evan_ wrote: post #95
DannyBee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 represe…

Are there really districts that split apartment buildings by floor? How is that described by the text that sets the boundaries?

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.

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

#145

Post by akiselev »

pkaeding wrote: post #124
ourmandave wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good luck with that! The side of the road is no place for yelling at or threatening cops.

Yeah that would probably not go well at all. However, there's no reason you can't have a polite conversation where you imply you know the sheriff personally. You can ask something like "How is Laurie doing?" and then something relevant like "My sister used to hang out with her in San Jose State" and "How are those new jail cameras working out? I heard she bought them herself! Wow!" just based off of Wikipedia [1] and some news articles [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Smith

[2] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/02/santa-clara-coun...

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

#146

Post by thex10 »

epoch_100 wrote: post #97

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 awesome. Are you looking for engineers/volunteers?

Also, don't listen to all these feature requests and get scope creep. The only additional thing I'd love to see is even more granular levels of officials, but I know how difficult/nonexistent the data is there.

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

#147

Post by doubt_me »

Larrikin wrote: post #136

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 s…

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/

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

#148

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

DrScump wrote: 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…

The info seems a bit out of date - Jim Griffith is no longer mayor and hasn't been so for about a year:

http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/CityGovernment/CityCouncil/Councilme...

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

#149

Post by tunesmith »

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).
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