
Ask HN: Political activism platform - iamdave
After recently coming across news that representatives in my state have introduced problematic and comparatively faulty legislation in the upcoming session, I&#x27;ve been moved to start a bit of a grassroots effort locally to combat the passage of those bills.<p>I&#x27;ve seen quite a few sites that allow people to enter their zip code and find their representative, does anyone know how I can find, or has anyone written and open-sourced this kind of lookup implementation?<p>Failing that, are there any platforms that this community would recommend that would allow a simple landing page with copy text, facts and info with linked sources, and then a web form to find their representative? Perhaps even a WordPress plugin that I should look at and build on top of?<p>Ultimately I&#x27;m trying to avoid people leaving the page to perform the lookup since I can&#x27;t guarantee that the receiving site will either handle incoming load, remain online, or even have the most up to date rep info.  If someone&#x27;s leaving the page, I&#x27;m hoping it&#x27;s primarily to read linked sources from the &quot;facts and info&quot; section.<p>Thanks!
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sjs382
Are you looking up representatives on the federal or state level? Fair
warning, if you're looking up state reps, a zip code lookup could return
multiple (sometimes 10+) representatives per zip.

Source: In my day job, I've built many one-off issue advocacy pages on both
the state and federal levels. Feel free to ping me if you want to talk about
it.

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iamdave
State level. I'll email you my ideas, thanks!

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Mz
[https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials](https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials)

[https://www.usa.gov/developer](https://www.usa.gov/developer)

[http://whoismyrepresentative.com/api](http://whoismyrepresentative.com/api)

There are wordpress plugins:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+plugin+find+my+rep...](https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+plugin+find+my+representative&oq=wordpress+plugin+find+my+repres&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j33.17133j0j4&client=tablet-
android-digiland&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)

This map can be embedded on your website:

[https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/map](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/map)

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iamdave
All great resources, thank you!

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chishaku
Congressional info API including ability to "Look up members of Congress by
location or by zip code."

[https://sunlightlabs.github.io/congress/](https://sunlightlabs.github.io/congress/)

Open States API for info on state legislators:

[https://openstates.org/](https://openstates.org/)

City council info for Chicago, Philly and NYC:

[https://www.councilmatic.org/](https://www.councilmatic.org/)

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id122015
well done! Programmers should be more involved in politics, and not on
government's side, but on people's side. There are many examples what to do
about it: transparent voting, list and rank all public sector employees, etc

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Raed667
[https://democracy.io](https://democracy.io)

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iamdave
This looks like exactly what I'd need, I'll email about their email API.

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jamesmp98
Out of interest? What state?

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joeclark77
His bio says he's in Austin, which is in (or at least surrounded by) Texas.

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iamdave
_(or at least surrounded by)_

Ha, yeah that's one way to put it

