tl;dr I was having a hard time researching votes for my representatives in Congress and decided to build a tool that aggregated the data into a view that was easy for me to parse.
With midterms coming up, I am trying to do my due diligence of researching my representatives in Congress to see whether their votes aligned with their public statements.
https://www.congress.gov actually has a list of all the votes if you search by congressperson. It was difficult for me to parse each individual vote out of the UI though due to all the unfilterable noise. In my opinion, the layout isn't really the best either. There are other aggregators out there like govtrack.us but none that I found which had a comprehensive list of every vote.
Luckily, I discovered that congress.gov makes the voting data readily available via an API. Unfortunately, it's only available for members in the House of Representatives. I had to use an alternate library for the Senate. Once I had all the data together, I was able to mangle it into a shape that made it much easier for me to parse through.
In order to make it easier to compare votes with my own views, I also made a "Vote Match" feature. This feature randomly displays various bills which lets me flip through them and think about how I would vote on them whenever I have a spare moment. Then, I can scroll through my representatives' pages and do a line by line comparison. Where we differ, I can further research to figure out reasons why my representative might have voted differently. I figured the tool would be useful to other US voters too so decided to make it public.
I also tried my best to make it as privacy oriented as possible. All pages are statically generated and the "Vote Match" feature saves everything in your browser's local storage. The address form is just a convenience feature that redirects to https://geocoding.geo.census.gov. However, I've included manual steps on how to find your district too.
Data shows that voting turn out is usually lower during a midterm election so I also tried to bake in a fun, easy way to share and encourage people in your life to vote. My inspiration here was Wordle's result sharing after you do the daily solve. There's a button on each representative's page that generates an image card of your vote match percentage that you can copy and share.
Any feedback is very much welcome. I'll also take any other tips and tricks you might have for researching to become a more informed voter.
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Show HN: Aggregating votes from US Congress representatives · HackerTrans
With midterms coming up, I am trying to do my due diligence of researching my representatives in Congress to see whether their votes aligned with their public statements.
https://www.congress.gov actually has a list of all the votes if you search by congressperson. It was difficult for me to parse each individual vote out of the UI though due to all the unfilterable noise. In my opinion, the layout isn't really the best either. There are other aggregators out there like govtrack.us but none that I found which had a comprehensive list of every vote.
Luckily, I discovered that congress.gov makes the voting data readily available via an API. Unfortunately, it's only available for members in the House of Representatives. I had to use an alternate library for the Senate. Once I had all the data together, I was able to mangle it into a shape that made it much easier for me to parse through.
In order to make it easier to compare votes with my own views, I also made a "Vote Match" feature. This feature randomly displays various bills which lets me flip through them and think about how I would vote on them whenever I have a spare moment. Then, I can scroll through my representatives' pages and do a line by line comparison. Where we differ, I can further research to figure out reasons why my representative might have voted differently. I figured the tool would be useful to other US voters too so decided to make it public.
I also tried my best to make it as privacy oriented as possible. All pages are statically generated and the "Vote Match" feature saves everything in your browser's local storage. The address form is just a convenience feature that redirects to https://geocoding.geo.census.gov. However, I've included manual steps on how to find your district too.
Data shows that voting turn out is usually lower during a midterm election so I also tried to bake in a fun, easy way to share and encourage people in your life to vote. My inspiration here was Wordle's result sharing after you do the daily solve. There's a button on each representative's page that generates an image card of your vote match percentage that you can copy and share.
Any feedback is very much welcome. I'll also take any other tips and tricks you might have for researching to become a more informed voter.