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
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].
Just as a heads up to people using this (and the creators), it also appears to be missing the thousands of elected school board members that make decisions for school districts
Having an exhaustively thorough scope of all elective offices, rather than the most-sought subset, magnifies the task tenfold or more, especially if that data isn't already available to them in their existing sources. Such critiques strike me as unduly harsh.
This is a great website, but the title claims to find "everyone" who represents you, but it doesn't. Its a good product decision to limit the scope, but the title needs to be clear about the limitations.
It is important that people know the breadth of government if only as a civil exercise.
I don't think the people who make this website don't know this is a limitation, and I especially don't think that they have some database they are hand editing with new information I might provide on this thread: my comment and information (which also wasn't "so much work": it took a few minutes; I attended a couple years of meetings of the Santa Barbara LAFCO and so I know how this stuff all works) is only relevant in the context of this thread as a reply to the comment making the website sound more local than it really 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...
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]
Uh, only unincorporated areas of Santa Clara County (and those few cities who subcontract law enforcement to the county, like Cupertino) fall under Smith's direct purview. Like most cities, Sunnyvale has its own P.D. (Department of Public Safety, in Sunnyvale's case -- combined Police and Fire).
That said, the jurisdiction of any given sworn law enforcement officer in CA is statewide, so any officer could pull you over regardless of what city you're in, theoretically.
> Someone needs to take a new approach to educating citizens about issues in an objective, non-biased manner
Not just issues, but even just positions. I honestly have no idea what several of these people's jobs are let alone their personal character and values. Would be handy for this site to link to a description of the position on wikipedia to find out what ways this person would be in a position to effect change in my life.
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.
Agree with not getting involved in feature creep. There are hundreds of failed civic tech projects, mostly because they tried to do too much. Users do want "positions" or "issues" etc. but those are really hard to find / build good data for. That's the next level!
epoch_100: Stick to making an awesome data source and interface to solve the one problem you've picked :)
In the UK mySociety does similar things, their WriteToThem services gives a drill-down on the politicians for a given postcode. You'd probably be really interested in their http://www.everypolitician.org/ project, which is trying to do this for the entire planet -- but generally working from the top down.
I'm involved with https://democracyclub.org.uk/, which works particularly on developing really good election data. epoch_100, reach out to one of us if you want to chat :)
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.
I once started trying to make something similar, but would also try to rank how "diluted" you are in the democracy by ranking your representative by a historical monarch that ruled over a similar sized constituency.
I approached it by trying to work from the census data but found it too difficult to work with.
What data sources are you working with?
Do you offer an API?
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.
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 )
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.
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/. Open Congress was another, but was shut down when the Sunlight Foundation went a bit haywire.
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.
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
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!
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), 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
"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 )
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you like whoaremyrepresentatives, we would love feedback on [Act On This](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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a part of my family that lived in pretty unstable foreign countries, and they were more than happy of being french when problems occurred because your country will make sure you're safe, so it's a little benefit (plus having one of the best passport in the world).
But I find it strange that you don't have a "citizen abroad" representative, I don't know how many of US citizen live abroad but since, as you say it, you pay taxes you should have some representation. Here in France we have 11 representative for expatriates and I always thought it would be the same anywhere.
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.
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 :)
Not really. You get to offset foreign taxes and exempt more income than most US residents earn.
The filing requirements are sort of onerous, the taxation isn't.
I can see where it is sort of punitive to pay taxes on a large capital gain that has nothing to do with the US, but when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of such income you are talking about outliers.
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?
there is a penalty because the system is supposed to reduce costs by enrolling everybody (even the healthiest who may feel like they don't need it) WHILE the health insurance sector still is a for-profit competitive market (so there's no "auto-enrolment").
If you consider citizenship to be "no benefit" (you can still vote, collect Social Security, etc. overseas), you could always renounce your citizenship.
If you honestly see no benefit of your US citizenship, or the costs outweigh the benefits, it sounds like you should change your citizenship status, perhaps to the country you're a resident in, or maybe move back to the US.
Yes Social Security is a "benefit", you more than likely will get back everything you paid in plus interest plus continue drawing a Social Security check beyond that. Last time I crunched the numbers a retiree would on average get back everything they paid in plus interest in just under 9 years. And that is a generous estimate since I averaged payments into the system over a typical working life instead of weighing them towards later in life (people tend to make more as they gain experience and their career advances).
Social Security is not a savings plan no matter how much you would like to think it is.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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