RepTracker

Track your representatives. Hold them accountable to your vote.
This project allows users to find their local congressional representatives, analyze voting records/statements, & generate AI-based summaries using Google Gemini.

Features

• Fetch local representatives by zipcode, identifying congressional districts & legislators via the Geocodio API
• Retrieve sponsored legislation & bill details for each representative or senator using the Congress.gov API
• Summarize political content using the Gemini API for quick, AI-generated overviews of bills or statements
• Store representative and bill data locally with SQLite and SQLAlchemy to enable caching and reduce API calls
• React frontend integrated with the Flask API for real-time display of legislative activity and summaries

Setup Instructions

1. clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/your-username/track-your-reps.git
cd reptracker/backend

2. Create local environment

cd backend
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate        # macOS/Linux
venv\Scripts\activate           # Windows

3. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. To run the app, you must put the following in a .env file (Note: verify it's ignored in the .gitignore file):

GEOCODIO_API_KEY=api_key_here 
GEMINI_API_KEY=api_key_here
CONGRESS_API_KEY=api_key_here

5. Run the app

python app.py

Frontend Side

1. Navigate to frontend directory

cd ../frontend

2. Install frontend dependencies

npm install

3. Start the server

npm run dev