Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government
whoaremyrepresentatives.org
whoaremyrepresentatives.org
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].
[1] http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election-information
[2] https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance
It is important that people know the breadth of government if only as a civil exercise.
Then it's just a quick jump over to the ACLU's Know Your Rights page...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Smith
[2] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/02/santa-clara-coun...
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.
http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/CityGovernment/CityCouncil/Councilme...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Thanks for the interest!
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?
Something to keep on a calendar.
Just noticed it's also missing local judges.
Also, contact info for government services itself - courts, schools, police depta, etc..
Maybe a multi-column layout? Anyway, nice work.
Why ask for nonessential information in the first place?
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 )
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.
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."
Anywho, it's often an uncontested race, as it was in 2016: http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf
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...
Then, show how they voted.
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.
We'll get on fixing that.
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.
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).
[1]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepre...
[2]http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...
We'll put up a cookie notification soon.
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.
Thanks for that idea. A simple yet effective solution that I hadn't thought of before.
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.
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 )
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.
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).
Is that still true now with the Citizens Redistricting Commission?
Gerrymandering probably still matters in swing states like Ohio and Florida, but only if modern tampering methods have been ruled out everywhere else.
It matters everywhere in the US, down to the school district level (or whatever municipal granularity you like). This is orthogonal to tampering.
Check Obama for an example.
Crowd sourcing them from select users could be a fast method.
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.
By the way, my address has 30 people, all the same color.
And as for all your reps being the same color, funny how democracy works out like that...
[1] In New Hampshire if the Governor is the Chairman of the Board the executive council is like the directors on the board.
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.
https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...
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.
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...
Edit: typo
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!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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.
Sadly, it's pretty rare.
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 :)
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/bor...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individ...
As a side note, the biggest difference seems to be how countries treat foreign income.
Almost every country that has Income Taxes will tax any local income.
But there's a lot of variance on what they do for foreign income.
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?
And as for voting, why? I have no representative to vote for.
https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...
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.
Social Security is not a savings plan no matter how much you would like to think it is.
(Submitted title was 'Enter your address and out everyone who represents you in government'.)
/b
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.
Source: multiple anecdotes from acquaintances and threads on /r/legaladvice
How would they know a yell or a letter came from a constituent?
I would agree, though it seems that your president-elect would not..
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.