CASE STUDY 01 / API APPLICATION · CIVIC DATA
CheckYourRepresentative.com: federal accountability, made searchable.
A public platform that lets any voter enter an address, see exactly how their member of Congress votes, see who funds them, and record their own position on the bills in front of Congress right now. Built and operated by Standard Data Company. Launched July 2026.
THE PROBLEM
The record exists. Nobody can use it.
Congressional votes, bill text, campaign finance filings, and federal spending are all public, but they live in different systems, in different formats, with different update schedules. A voter who wants to know how their representative voted on a specific bill, and who paid for the campaign, has to visit four sites and know what to look for on each one.
THE BUILD
Four federal sources, one searchable model.
SOURCE
Congress.gov
Members, bills, roll-call votes, and bill status synced on a schedule through the official API.
SOURCE
Federal Election Commission
Campaign finance filings and contributor data through the FEC API.
SOURCE
Federal spending and program data
Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, and NGO funding flows for the Follow the Money views.
SOURCE
Nonprofit filings
ProPublica 990 data and the IRS revocation list for the NGO Watch pipeline.
DATA
Postgres on Neon
Scheduled ETL jobs reconcile every source into one model with history, so the site can answer what changed and when.
STACK
React on Vercel
Fast address lookup, district matching, and server-rendered pages for search.
FEATURES
What a voter can do.
Enter an address and find their House member and senators.
Browse the Roll Call Explorer: every recorded vote, by member and by bill.
Follow active bills and record their own position on each one.
See campaign finance by member in the Follow the Money views.
Open RepSpace: a profile card for each member backed by real federal data.
Check Colorado judges in Know Your Judge, with 50-state expansion planned.
Get Floor Alerts when a tracked bill moves.
ENGINEERING
What we learned building it.
Government APIs change without notice. Every integration has retries, schema checks, and alerts.
Secrets stay server-side. API keys live in environment configuration and are rotated on a schedule.
Scheduled ingestion beats live calls. Users get fast pages and the site survives source outages.
Address matching is the hardest part. District lookup is built on official boundary data, not guesses.
Clear data freshness statements build more trust than pretending data is live.
The platform is owned by Standard Data Company and operated by We The People Inc. It is the production proof behind every API-powered application and data product we scope.
NEXT
Tell us what your users need to find.
0 likes · 1 view · Oct 23, 2026
Voter accountability platform: address lookup, congressional votes, bills, and campaign finance from Congress.gov and the FEC, searchable in one place.
