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), 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.
> 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).
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.
Keep in mind you may be on the border of a district. Your neighbor and you may not be in the same district. Likely won't make a difference, but it may. Maybe check multiple neighbors.
Would it be possible to provide this data, based on the address, via a JSON API?
I had goals to eventually to build a site that was similar but also shows political leanings and term length and when the next election for that position was going to occur. The desire is to build the core of a grassroots "run for elected seats" web service.
"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list."
This is not even, sadly, close to true.
In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes.
While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions.
We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ...
In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed!
This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty.
Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much.
(For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )
Where they intend to do it, they just draw the lines in 2d by lat/long or whatever, and if it goes through the middle of a building, oh well. The number of states still doing this is small -10 or less I believe.
When they don't, you see cases like New York city, where they don't theoretically split by Apartment, but if you look at the official data, you discover addresses in the same apartment building have been given different voting districts or whatever (this happens for all political district types). This is quite common. Remember that they use the same data, so they give you wrong answers too (until you get it corrected)! For reps you just give a wrong answer or nothing if you can detect it, but for things like voting, you tell them to call their state or whatever, because you can't risk it.
Oh, yikes. It's much more complicated than that, especially to get localized offices and districts. I used to create voter data systems for candidates (clear back to when the data was available only on 9-track drives!), and it was quite a learning experience.
CA, for example, has become so carefully gerrymandered that one of the buildings in my neighborhood is split between Assembly districts.
It gets worse, or more detailed, anyway. Your city for your mailing address may not be your actual city of residence -- the true boundary is by real estate parcel. For example, there are many Los Gatos mailing addresses that are in Saratoga, or vice-versa, plus many that are on unincorporated (county) land. Mailing address "city" is assigned for the convenience of the Post Office and only roughly parallels actual political boundaries, which are always by parcel.
So, you could differ from your CA neighbor in any of these respects:
Assembly district
Senate district
Congressional district
City (or none, if unincorporated parcel)
County Supervisorial district
City council district (for district cities, as opposed to at-large council cities).
There have been other sites that gave this level of detail:
- Project Vote Smart, which is still there but I can't find any tell-me-my-districs feature anymore, even after registering.
- Smartvoter.org is still there, but it oddly wasn't updated for the 2016 General. You can tell your districts that were up for a given election by looking at that ballot, but I don't see a comprehensive way to see all of your districts there (any seat not on that particular ballot is omitted entirely).
No, it's not. Zip codes have absolutely no bearing on government/political boundaries, they have more to do with which post office is closest. For example, my zip code growing up was shared between two different towns.
And indeed districts can be quite fairly distributed, rather than gerrymandered, in such a way that they cover different parts of a zip/post code area.
Although cyberwarfare and technological vulnerabilities that affect ballot collection and counting seem to be more potent than gerrymandering at this point, with modern elections.
Gerrymandering probably still matters in swing states like Ohio and Florida, but only if modern tampering methods have been ruled out everywhere else.
