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The
VoterSpeak Letter Project
requires a method of automatically looking up elected officials based on
a zipcode or state name. Unbeknownst to us, this turns out to
be an expensive prospect. Each update costs between $100 and $800, depending
on where you go. The updates come out bi-annually or semi-annually, again
depending on where you go. All of this gets to be fairly depressing for
a free site and we haven't completely solved the issue.
Several sites have a "free" lookup service
but there is no easy way to automate that process. (Also, we didn't
want to barrage other sites with our traffic if we could avoid it.)
However, not all is lost. We found a set of text files on the Government Printing Office website that is mostly up to date (updates on a January/August cycle) and fairly accurate. Unfortunately, the data is not in a "computer-friendly" format, so we've developed various parsing scripts to pull the data out of the text files and into the VoterSpeak database engine. We need your help to see how well the program is performing. Please run a search (enter a zipcode in the blue box above) and provide feedback on the accuracy of the search results. Entering a zip code should produce the US Representative(s) representing that area, as well as the US Senators for that state. If you enter just a state name (full state name, no abbreviations yet), it should produce the two US Senators.
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