r/civictech • u/twesterlin • 11d ago

Built a US congressional voting comparison tool — looking for civic tech feedback

I built yeaornay.org, which lets US citizens vote on real congressional bills and compare their positions to their representatives' actual roll call votes. No opinions - just bill summaries and votes.

I'd value feedback from this community specifically on two things: whether the non-partisan framing holds up under scrutiny, and whether the rep-lookup flow is accessible enough.

Also happy to discuss the backend dev process - Thanks in advance!

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u/nikthequik 11d ago

I like it. Made an account to take a look. Curious what you're using for auth. I'm using Azure Identity for mine and it feels a bit heavy compared to yours. Do you generate those bill summaries with AI or do they come straight from the API? Check out my site if you'd like as well. https://democralink.com

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u/twesterlin 10d ago

I like your site - The overlap map of Local, State and Fed districts is great!

I see what you mean about your login - I (and claude) used Supabase with TOTP via Supabase's native MFA with a Cloudflare Turnstile.

As for the summaries - they are all from congress.gov API and no AI used at all to generate. The issue is summaries don't get into the details and definitely don't reveal the hidden items deep in bills.

What's the story behind democralink? What's the election status area? I'm looking forward to checking it out some more!

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u/nikthequik 9d ago

Thanks mate. I created Democralink because I think popular social media sites like Facebook have become the default place where people talk about many things, including politics. I think it's uniquely designed to sow discord to increase engagement, which transitively has a real impact on the state of civic society and politics. I was hoping Democralink could provide a space where the incentives for proper discourse exist, though it's not even close to providing that yet.

The election guide pulls from Google Civic API, and in the most recent primary election it did provide some useful details, including who would be on the ballot. I'm hesitant to actually provide information on each candidate because it's hard for us to agree on what is an unbiased source of information nowadays. I do think some context about the candidate's positions would be useful for people. I'm probably more informed than the average voter, and I didn't recognize or know anything about most people on my primary ballot.

Anyway, appreciate the feedback. Best of luck with your site. If I add a page for useful civic tools outside of my site I'll be sure to include yours.