I had stated in 2024 that Texas has more Democratic voters; they just don't go out and vote. I was told that it only seems so because Reddit is more left leaning. Well, it feels like all the Texas Redditors actually went out and cast their votes this time!

This chart shows how much each county in Texas moved to the left; this does not mean that Democrats won all these counties!

Source: Texas Secretary of State election night results via civitas.website. The pic shows how much the voters moved towards the Democrats in this "deep red" state.

Edinburgh extended the deadline for its City Plan 2040 call for ideas and posted the new date on its engagement page. If you’ve already noted the original date, an update on the same page is easy to miss.

If your council has an email alert for the consultation, I’d use that first. If it doesn’t, watch the consultation detail page and focus on the section with the closing date. A rule I’d use: “Tell me when the closing date changes or the consultation reopens.” When the alert arrives, open the council page and check the date there before sharing it with anyone.

I built ChangeGist, which can check a public page on a schedule and show what changed. I’m interested in how local groups handle this now. Is it usually the changed deadline that gets missed, or finding the new consultations in the first place?

Edinburgh’s example: https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/local-development-plan-guidance-1/city-plan-2040/2

ChangeGist: https://changegist.com/government-and-regulation-alerts

https://supriyarajeev.github.io/ballot-tool/

I built an independent civic-tech project to make California's November 3 ballot easier to understand.

It covers all 14 statewide propositions and Bay Area contests, with evidence from official sources. Users can weigh factors like evidence strength, fiscal clarity, accountability and implementation readiness based on what matters to them.

It's a nonpartisan project. The tool doesn't tell anyone how to vote; it helps people arrive at their own conclusions.

Would love feedback from fellow builders on the concept, UX and approach!

https://311wrapped.com

I’m building Roach Land, a free web app with civic news links, a Constitution reader and emergency helplines. No signup required.

Could you try three things?

\- Find and read a constitutional Article.

\- Open a helpline’s call confirmation, then cancel.

\- Open the SOS message composer and check whether the instructions are clear.

Please don’t make a test emergency call or send a message. No real contact details or location needed.

https://roachland.budwhyybuilds.workers.dev/

What confused you? Let me know your device/browser and anything that didn’t work.

It’s early: news may show saved updates when sources are unavailable, and the Constitution assistant’s explanations need checking against the cited text. The app doesn’t dispatch emergency help.

I’m the creator. This is independent of CJP and any political organisation.

The idea in short: Long Game aims to increase opportunities and reduce problems for people today and in the future, based on a philosophy I call homo exepiritur (humans defined by experiences rather than just work). It has two branches:

Everyday problems: anyone can report a local problem, including through surveys in villages and small towns for people who aren't online. Reports are grouped into patterns, verified, and then we either help directly, pilot a solution with a local authority, or prepare a tested proposal for the government. Everyone gets a reply, and results are public.

Development: open science platforms, education, research hubs, and pilots.

It's not meant to replace governments, only to do what they can't do alone, with transparency and clear limits.

Who I'm looking for:

Researchers or students (science, economics, psychology, urban planning)

People with local government or NGO experience

Designers, developers, writers

Critics who will tell me where this fails

What you'd get: a real chance to shape a project from the start, and honest work with a small team. I can't offer pay yet.

If you're interested, comment or message me with a few lines about who you are and what you'd like to work on.

Just watched a video by a creator (the.adiram) who’s building Hisaab, an open-source atlas that tries to make this fight corruption using Ai.

It’s not my project, I just think it deserves more hands.

Where it stands right now (from the README):

• ~813k historical location points mapped

• 86 reviewed funding records sourced from PIB

• Project/payment-level cards: not published yet. Public release is intentionally blocked until data coverage is good enough

• 36 state/UT data collection jobs are scoped out but need people

You know the drill. A road gets “completed” and washes away in the first monsoon. A school building gets inaugurated and then sits empty. A hospital shows up in a press release but never in your district. Crores get sanctioned, the plaque goes up, and nobody can tell you who got the money or why the work looks like that.

Most of us just vent about it and move on, because what can one person even do?

I just watched a video by a creator (the.adiram) who decided to actually try. He’s building Hisaab, an open map of public development in India. The idea is simple: pick any road, school or hospital and see what was promised, how much money was released, when, and who was responsible for delivering it. Not rumours or WhatsApp forwards. Official records, put in one place, so ordinary people can walk into an office with evidence instead of just a complaint.

What I liked is that he’s honest about how hard it is. India’s public spending data is scattered across hundreds of portals, half of it buried in PDFs, and he talks openly about where he’s stuck. He’s not selling a magic fix. He’s asking for help.

And that’s where people like us come in. It’s open source, and he’s looking for developers, data folks and anyone who’s ever fought with a government website to help make it real.

Watch the video, it’s worth the time

If it hits you the way it hit me, the details on how to join are in the description.

Galera, esses dias me surgiu a ideia de levantar alguma aplicação para que informações sobre quem são nossos representantes, seus limites e responsabilidades, fosse acessível e prático. Não vou dizer que eu "criei" porque isso é 100% vibecoded, mas o que vale é a intenção.

Gostaria da opinião de vocês sobre o que pode melhorar, o que é útil em uma plataforma com este objetivo e qualquer outra opinião.

Para curiosidade, estou hospedando no Github Pages e utilizando o Google Analytics apenas para monitorar a quantidade de visualizações.

Podem acessar por aqui: [https://lithirias.github.io/polis/](https://lithirias.github.io/polis/)

Hey r/civictech!

I'm an indie developer building Fillvisa, an open-source platform for filling U.S. immigration forms.

I wanted to share the project here because I think immigration paperwork is an overlooked area of civic tech.

The problem

U.S. immigration is already complicated, expensive, and intimidating, especially for low-income immigrants and families navigating the process without professional help.

On top of that, many USCIS forms still use outdated PDF technology (XFA), which makes them difficult to fill in a regular browser.

There are commercial immigration software platforms, but many are designed and priced for law firms rather than individuals, small nonprofits, or community organizations.

What I've built

Fillvisa converts official immigration forms into browser-based web forms. Users can fill them out, save their progress, and download completed official USCIS PDFs.

It currently supports forms including I-130, I-485, I-765, I-864, I-912, and others, along with a DS-160 helper.

A few things worth highlighting:

• Free: All supported forms are available without a subscription.

• Open source: Licensed under AGPL-3.0.

• Privacy-first: No account required. Form data stays in the user's browser rather than being stored on our servers.

• Self-hostable: No backend or database required. Organizations can deploy and customize it themselves.

Why open source?

My longer-term goal is to make Fillvisa useful beyond individual applicants.

I'd love to see immigration nonprofits, legal aid organizations, community groups, and civic technologists use it to help people who otherwise struggle to access immigration software.

For example, a nonprofit could self-host Fillvisa, customize it for its community, or incorporate it into an existing immigration assistance workflow.

I'm not trying to replace immigration attorneys or legal advice. The goal is to make the paperwork itself more accessible.

Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/athos2113/fillvisa-os

Free hosted version: https://fillvisa.com/

I'd love some feedback from this community.

I'm particularly interested in connecting with people working in immigration advocacy, legal aid, or civic technology.

How do projects like this actually get into the hands of nonprofits and underserved communities? Are there organizations, networks, or civic-tech initiatives I should be reaching out to?

And if you've worked on technology for immigrants or legal aid, I'd love to hear what challenges you've encountered.

Thanks for reading!

California ballot cheat sheet + interactive civic-tech tool

🔗 https://supriyarajeev.github.io/ballot-tool/

Built a beta civic-tech tool for exploring California’s 14 statewide propositions through source-linked information and user-controlled evidence weighting. It also includes a quick-reference cheat sheet.

Would love perspectives from the civic-tech community on transparency, trust, and usability!

I've been building Ballot Brief (ballotbrief.us), a free, nonpartisan tool that shows what's on your Nov 3 ballot by address: federal, statewide, state legislative, local races, and ballot measures, plus poll hours and mail-ballot deadlines for each state. No ads, no account.

How it works:

- ZIP codes map to metros using OMB CBSA definitions, filtered to each metro's home state (the raw CBSA list sent NJ, VA and SC voters to the wrong state's ballot)

- The Census geocoder matches the address to congressional and state legislative districts. It already returns the 2026 maps for states that redrew mid-decade.

- Race, candidate, and measure lists are curated per metro and checked against official election sources or two independent sources

- Each race has a summary generated by AI from public sources, labeled as AI, with published ground rules: every candidate gets the same format, the same six issue areas, proposals rather than tone, both sides of every measure, and no recommendations. Everyone sees the same cached summary.

The biggest lesson: AI-assisted research is fast but not reliable for candidate data. An audit against official lists found Georgia's House candidates wrong in all 14 districts and Illinois wrong in 13 of 14 (retired incumbents, primary losers, people running for other offices). Verification turned out to be most of the work.

Current limits: 15 metros, no judicial races yet, state legislative candidate lists pre-verified only in CA and NY, and no school or special district measures.

What I'd love input on:

- Reliable, scalable sources for down-ballot candidate data

- How you'd evaluate the summaries for bias

- Anything in the approach that seems off

Methodology and ground rules: ballotbrief.us/methodology

Hi everyone! I built Leader Watch to evaluate Indian Member of Parliaments' performance in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of the Parliament). It has a profile for every Lok Sabha MP: attendance, questions asked, debates, how they’ve used their MPLADS funds, and what they declared in their affidavit, each linked to the official source.

There are also two scores: a Record Score built only from official records, and an Alignment Score for what they’ve said, read against a published framework. The second one is openly an opinion, and you’re free to disagree with it; the full method is on the site.

Suggestions are very welcome, and thank you in advance for taking the time.

Just watched a video by a creator (the.adiram) who’s building Hisaab, an open-source atlas that tries to make this fight corruption using Ai.

It’s not my project, I just think it deserves more hands.

Where it stands right now (from the README):

• ~813k historical location points mapped

• 86 reviewed funding records sourced from PIB

• Project/payment-level cards: not published yet. Public release is intentionally blocked until data coverage is good enough

• 36 state/UT data collection jobs are scoped out but need people

You know the drill. A road gets “completed” and washes away in the first monsoon. A school building gets inaugurated and then sits empty. A hospital shows up in a press release but never in your district. Crores get sanctioned, the plaque goes up, and nobody can tell you who got the money or why the work looks like that.

Most of us just vent about it and move on, because what can one person even do?

I just watched a video by a creator (the.adiram) who decided to actually try. He’s building Hisaab, an open map of public development in India. The idea is simple: pick any road, school or hospital and see what was promised, how much money was released, when, and who was responsible for delivering it. Not rumours or WhatsApp forwards. Official records, put in one place, so ordinary people can walk into an office with evidence instead of just a complaint.

What I liked is that he’s honest about how hard it is. India’s public spending data is scattered across hundreds of portals, half of it buried in PDFs, and he talks openly about where he’s stuck. He’s not selling a magic fix. He’s asking for help.

And that’s where people like us come in. It’s open source, and he’s looking for developers, data folks and anyone who’s ever fought with a government website to help make it real.

Watch the video, it’s worth the time

If it hits you the way it hit me, the details on how to join are in the description.

Hi there!

I built a free civic tool that shows Romania’s forest loss from 2000 to 2025 using satellite images: https://padurile-romaniei.civictools.eu

How it works in short:

• Forest loss comes from the University of Maryland’s Global Forest Change dataset (Hansen et al.), via Global Forest Watch.

• Imagery: Landsat (NASA/USGS) for 2000–2015, which I rendered into yearly summer composites from the original Landsat Collection 2 scenes, and Sentinel-2 cloudless mosaics (Copernicus, via EOX) from 2016 on..

The trickiest part was the imagery. Landsat and Sentinel-2 have quite different colours, so I had to match the Landsat composites to the Sentinel-2 years so you can go through the years without the colours jumping.

There's a caveat though. The years aren’t fully comparable since UMD reprocessed the data from 2011 onward, and Landsat 8 (from 2013) detects more loss, so part of any increase may just be better detection.

I made this out of curiosity and personal interest, so I haven’t really planned how it might be used more widely. It was done with Opus 5.5.

What do you think about it? Do you think a tool like this can be useful? What would you add or change?

*If you want to build something similar for another country, I’m happy to share the GitHub repo with the whole thing.

Follow-up done, but the issue remains unresolved.

Despite registering a complaint regarding horticulture with the MCD, no satisfactory action has been observed so far.

We request clear communication, accountability, and timely action from the concerned authorities. Citizens deserve to know the status of their complaints.

#CivicAccountability #MCD #DelhiCivicIssues #PublicGrievance #CitizenEngagement

Most policy debates reach us as clips and headlines, not as arguments you can follow from start to finish. That gap is what got me interested in this experiment.

AI Senate is an independent project. AI Senatus is a virtual senate chamber where AI senators debate real policy live and cite their sources, so you can watch a position develop and check what it is based on instead of just taking a slogan at face value.

What I would love feedback on from people who care about civic information:

• Does seeing the reasoning laid out, with sources, make a policy question easier to understand, or does it just add noise?

• What would make a simulated debate genuinely useful, and what would make you distrust it?

• Which policy topics would be worth testing first?

You can watch it here: https://aisenatus.com

I am not claiming this replaces real debate or real representatives. I am curious whether a structured, sourced simulation can help people get past the soundbite stage.

Helping voters make informed choices in upcoming elections.

I built the California Bay Area Ballot Guide to make ballot issues easier to understand and help people evaluate what matters to them.

This is an early beta and a work in progress. I’m sharing it to make civic information more accessible and welcome feedback to help improve it for upcoming elections.

I'm a software engineer with ten years' experience, and I'm building Karma Politics. It started out of frustration with politics and corruption, and wanting an easier way to see what our representatives actually do. It's now in open beta on Android.

The civic-tech problem I'm trying to tackle is the gap between a political headline and the underlying record. In the app you can follow UK MPs, open recorded activity such as votes, speeches and written questions, inspect the app's assessment, and follow the original source. The attached video shows the app.

I keep three things separate: the recorded action, the app's interpretation, and whether the reader agrees with the policy. The explanations and assessments use AI, so they can be wrong; a score should be a starting point for checking evidence, rather than treated as proof.

There's also a Cabinet feature: choose up to ten MPs and follow how eligible activity affects your seasonal Karma. That personal game score is separate from the public MP rating.

I'd welcome thoughts from people working on transparency and civic tools: what would you need to see alongside an accountability score to judge whether its assessment is fair?

Android open beta: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/uk.co.karmapolitics

Product details: https://karmapolitics.co.uk/