Gerrymandered

Searching using address
Voting record
Home page
Result from providing browser location to site
Results page
Edge case: District of Columbia
FAQ snippets 1
FAQ snippets 2

About The Site: Gerrymandered.net

Gerrymandered.net was created by Yash Aggarwal, Sami Glasco, and Zeyi Lin during the weekend of January 15 - 17, 2016, for the 2016 HackRice hackathon. With the heated debates of the 2016 Presidential primary races already underway early in 2016, this website serves to underscore the continued importance of Congressional races even during Presidential election years.

What it does

The website allows users to enter a location within the United States and territories to see in which Congressional districts they live and who their Members of Congress are. Users can submit parts of a full address, a zip code, geographical coordinates, or use the browser-based location tool to pass in an address.

Once a valid location in the 50 U.S. states or territories is entered, the user is greeted with the name and a map of his or her Congressional district. Below the map is more information about the lawmakers in each district, including the district representative in the House and the two state Senators. For citizens to engage, there are options to:

view these lawmakers' voting records for bills, resolutions, nominations, or other measures
visit their websites
contact them over the phone
send documents to them via fax
provide consituent feedback directly online
like them on Facebook
follow them on Twitter

In addition, there is an FAQ section to the site that explains the concept of gerrymandering and why it is electorally significant to the average voter. There is also a prompt to help build a broader base of eligible voters by linking to resources that help them to register to vote if they have not done so already.

How we built it

Gerrymandered.net was built using the following tools:

Atom
Flask
Google Maps API
govtrack.us API
Handlebars
Heroku
MacDown
Map of the United States: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-USA-states.PNG
The New York Times Congress API
PureCSS
Python
Slack
The Sunlight Foundation API
WebStorm
...and a generous amount of food and caffeine from the hosts of HackRice

Challenges we ran into

Gerrymandered.net was not our first idea; we originally thought of a broadband comparison tool that would scrape the websites of various Internet Service Providers and give the user the best "bang-for-buck" Internet deal. However, this idea was already in very mature fruition--just see some of the talented work done by the folks at http://broadbandnow.com/.

Having scrapped our initial idea Saturday morning, the main challenge that our team encountered was the time crunch of finding a new idea. After a quick session of brainstorming, we were off to the races.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

HackRice was our first hackathon! There were many new experiences for the whole team but above all we were thrilled to follow through with this commitment and see this project come to fruition.

In particular, for our first hackathon, we felt that we were able to iterate quickly and work together effectively. For example, being able to pick up the syntax of a new language like Python or explore new ways of using services like Heroku were fun learning opportunities that will prove invaluable in the future. For two of our group members, it was our first full stack website, and being able to transition between having a back-end and front-end role was fun.

Another accomplishment we were proud of was exploring the hackathon from a more civic-minded perspective. In today's day and age it is easy to drown out voices in heated political debate, so we thought that any little tool to help quell those passions and bring about objectivity and transparency could help.

What we learned

We primarily learned the power of APIs. Without the availability of numerous datasets, such as the ones made accessible by using APIs provided by govtrack.us, the Sunlight Foundation, and the New York Times, we would not have been able to easily access such rich historical data.

On the otherhand, we also learned that sometimes APIs may have their own issues--one of the API calls that we used returned some inconsistent data. We actually ended up making our first API issue report this way.

What's next for Gerrymandered

A few things are left to do for the site, and with some extra time and tweaking, we think they can happen:

a graphical interpretation or visualization of Member of Congress' voting records over time
state and local representative information
exploration of other APIs, such as Google's Civic Information API--there's a whole new world out there!