
Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government - tonyztan
https://whoaremyrepresentatives.org/
======
DrScump
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

~~~
saurik
> _it yields detail clear down to local offices_

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](http://www.openspace.org/about-us/election-information)

[2]
[https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance](https://www.elcaminohealthcaredistrict.org/governance)

[3]
[http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx](http://www.valleywater.org/About/BoardOfDirectors.aspx)

[4] [http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps](http://www.santaclaralafco.org/maps)

~~~
mandelbulb
Why do so much work and post on HN instead of sending them a quick mail?

~~~
shardo
To be fair, chances are the website makers are going to go through every
single Hacker news comment anyway.

~~~
epoch_100
We've been lurking...

------
epoch_100
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.

~~~
thex10
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.

~~~
tfgg
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/](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/](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 :)

------
Larrikin
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.

~~~
doubt_me
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/](https://openstates.org/)

------
padobson
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.

~~~
camiller
Coroner is an elected position where you live?

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.

~~~
padobson
>Coroner is an elected position where you live?

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](http://www.boe.co.trumbull.oh.us/pdfs/Results_16P.pdf)

------
saurik
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).

~~~
deathhand
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.

~~~
saurik
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.

[https://vimeo.com/126618332](https://vimeo.com/126618332)

------
Tau_Zero
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...](https://console.developers.google.com/apis/api/civicinfo/quotas?project=324870654357)

~~~
epoch_100
We reached out to Google, and they increased our quota. Try now!

~~~
ada1981
A good opportunity for you to include a "donate now" button when the service
is down :)

------
11thEarlOfMar
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.

Then, show how they voted.

~~~
tfgg
> constituent comments for the bills

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/](https://www.govtrack.us/). Open Congress was
another, but was shut down when the Sunlight Foundation went a bit haywire.

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

~~~
epoch_100
Yes, that's one of our primary data sources. We're working on leaving it,
however, because we're also Google-phobes.

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

~~~
epoch_100
It's an honor. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.

------
jonknee
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!

~~~
ytjohn
Today you have learned something new about your Senator.

------
coreyp_1
Why does it ask for your address? Just entering your zip code is sufficient to
obtain a list. Are they harvesting the address data for some reason?

~~~
epoch_100
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](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.

~~~
tombrossman
> 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).

[0][https://clicky.com/terms](https://clicky.com/terms)

[1][https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepre...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=whoaremyrepresentatives.org)

[2][http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...](http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#server_tokens)

~~~
epoch_100
You clearly did your research.

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.

------
jedbrown
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.

------
2sk21
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.

------
dsalzman
Feature Request: Add a picture of the representative when you use + to drill
down. It's nice to attach a face to a name.

~~~
epoch_100
Already implemented for most high-level representatives ;)

Check Obama for an example.

~~~
dsalzman
Great! I was only looking at the local state reps when I tested with my
address.

Crowd sourcing them from select users could be a fast method.

------
protomyth
It would be nice if sites like this started taking into account Tribal
governments. Otherwise, nice and simple website.

------
mdc2161
If you like whoaremyrepresentatives, we would love feedback on [Act On
This]([https://www.actonthis.org/](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.

------
WhitneyLand
Fantastic service. Should it then link to their position all the top issues,
like for, against, or refuses to commit?

By the way, my address has 30 people, all the same color.

~~~
epoch_100
That would be an interesting continuation of the site... we will look into it.

And as for all your reps being the same color, funny how democracy works out
like that...

~~~
CodeWriter23
I'd say also deep linking into followthemoney.org would help more thoroughly
explore a politician's alignment on issues.

------
throwaway2016a
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.

------
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).

------
cpeterso
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.

------
jzwinck
I'm one of the millions of Americans living overseas. Who represents us?

~~~
grzm
Depends on where you're registered to vote:

[https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...](https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-
matters/benefits/voting.html)

------
wishinghand
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.

~~~
Stratoscope
One API for this is Google's Civic Information API:

[https://developers.google.com/civic-
information/](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...](https://developers.google.com/civic-
information/docs/using_api)

And this page discusses the quality and limitations of the data:

[https://developers.google.com/civic-
information/docs/data_gu...](https://developers.google.com/civic-
information/docs/data_guidelines)

------
creepydata
Not everyone, doesn't show my mayor or city council.

------
ryao
I wanted to find out who my representatives were to discuss the state of
internet connectivity in my area. This made the research easy. :)

------
mushmouth
This would be really useful for other countries. since some of the info is
hard to find.

------
andyfleming
It would be nice to be able to expand the list view of this to print to a PDF.

------
jelder
Severely inaccurate results for me. Gave me reps for CT but I live in MA.

Edit: typo

~~~
losvedir
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.

------
Pigo
Brought to you by the left-wing preachy makers of BibleOrQuran

------
ada1981
this should be an official .gov website

------
ch
Funny. The results keep coming back empty for me.

------
jamisteven
Site is down.

~~~
epoch_100
...and site is back up. We reached out to Google and they increased our quota.

------
tonetheman
Very cool.

------
chanandler_bong
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.

~~~
masonic
If you consider citizenship to be "no benefit" (you can still vote, collect
Social Security, etc. overseas), you could always renounce your citizenship.

~~~
chanandler_bong
Social Security is not a "benefit". It is getting money back that I have paid
in to the system.

And as for voting, why? I have no representative to vote for.

~~~
grzm
If you're registered to vote in the US, you have representatives to vote for.

[https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...](https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-
matters/benefits/voting.html)

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.

------
cperciva
I'm guessing the title was intended to have s/and out/and find out/ ?

~~~
dang
I was kind of enjoying 'out' as the verb, but you're probably right.

(Submitted title was 'Enter your address and out everyone who represents you
in government'.)

~~~
cperciva
Indeed, I was musing on the question of "outing" politicians, but while
interesting I don't think it was what was intended. :-)

------
rocky1138
It's important to note that this is US only.

~~~
iagooar
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.

~~~
chewyfruitloop
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.

------
Proven
LOL, yeah right they "represent" you. You wouldn't need that site if they did.

------
briankwest
Data is stale, My uncle Ronnie was killed three years ago, and they still have
him listed.

/b

------
source99
I really don't understand this.

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.

~~~
afarrell
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

~~~
massysett
Legislators typically have staff for whom constituent service is a full-time
job, so I figure they should help me.

------
fnj
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.

~~~
fnj
The knee-jerk intolerant censors are out in force today, eh?

