Check Your Politician

The problem

A ballot lists names. It doesn't say who's funding a campaign or how someone has actually voted once they're in office. I hit that gap firsthand this election: reading articles and watching debate clips for hours just to feel confident enough to vote, and still not sure I had the full picture.

What I built

At Anthropic's LA Claude Impact Lab, a one-day hackathon pairing builders with real civic problems, I joined a 4-person team (shoutout Bruna and Matthew) building against LA's June 2026 election. In the day's build window we shipped a working demo covering three officials: campaign donor data pulled from the LA City Ethics Commission, lined up next to each official's voting and proposal record.

I kept building after the event, and two additions came directly out of team feedback. Bruna's idea turned a basic donation bar chart into a full donor contribution map, tiles sized by contribution amount and color-coded by donor type (individual, PAC, business), pulled straight from Ethics Commission filings. Matthew's idea added an "Ask AI" box to every official's page, so anyone can ask what a candidate supports on a given issue and get a sourced answer back.

Under the hood

• Data: LA City Ethics Commission campaign contribution filings (data.lacity.org) plus each official's public voting and proposal record
• Map: Leaflet, using the City of LA's own adopted council district boundaries (LA GeoHub, 2021)
• AI Q&A: Perplexity search, cited sources on every answer
• Pipeline: a monthly automated job re-pulls the underlying data and repopulates the site with no manual step
• Hosting: Vercel

Where it stands

The site now covers the mayor and all 15 city council districts, up from the 3 we scoped for the demo. It's live, free, and the repo is open for anyone who wants to extend it, add their own city, or flag where the data's wrong.

Stack