PoliAid

An easy-to-use web app that helps Michigan voters track the stance of representatives' on environmental issues and draft AI-powered emails to make their voices heard on sustainability issues.

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Go to our website through our link: PoliAid Website Apologies if it breaks lol

Watch Our Video Demo: PoliAid Video Demo

Inspiration

Have you ever tried to look up information about a politician's stance on the environment when voting and realized that it's seemingly impossible to find information? With PoliAid, we were inspired to solve this issue by creating something that allows users to easily access information about politicians so that they can make the most informed choice possible when voting. Since it's often the hardest to take the first step to make your voice heard, we were also inspired to help users directly reach out to representatives about current sustainability issues to hopefully help facilitate changes in legislature to help our environment.

What it does

PoliAid is a handy web app that allows users to search through Michigan representatives and find information on their environmental and political stance. In addition to information about policies that representatives did and didn't vote for, the app also provides details on the representative's contact information through the help of AI. To help users provide feedback to representatives on their legislative decisions, the app also has a feature that allows the user to generate an email draft to write to representatives about political and environmental issues.

How we built it

We built PoliAid by web scraping the following websites using python and Beautiful Soup in order to get the information about Michigan representatives, and then stored all of this information using MongoDB Atlas.

michiganvotes.org - legislature.mi.gov - house.mi.gov

  • Our front-end website was built using React and Tailwind
  • We used OpenAI to implement the email generation feature into our website

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges with this project was merge conflicts, since we had some issues getting everything to work coherently. Connecting the front end with the backend was definitely a challenge, and we also had some trouble getting the website to deploy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to finish this project within 24 hours and it works!

What we learned

We learned a lot about connecting the frontend with the backend for this project, and also about how to use MongoDB and integrate AI into our project successfully!

What's next for PoliAid

Right now, PoliAid only features representatives from Michigan. One day, we hope that we can expand PoliAid to help users make informed choices for all 50 states!

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