Create a Website to Hold Your Elected Officials Accountable

Want to make a difference? One powerful way to hold your elected officials accountable is to create a website dedicated to analyzing their voting records and informing your community. This tutorial will guide you through the process and include examples of tools that you can use for this work.

Buy a website domain with hosting for your representative. Porkbun is easy to use and simple .com domains cost less than $15. Porkbun includes WordPress hosting for $120/year.

Domain names could be, in which ‘XXXX’ is your representative’s last name:

XXXXforCongress.com
XXXXHouseRepresentative.com
XXXXSenate.com
XXXXforStateName.com

Analyze your representative’s voting and bill sponsorship history. Perplexity.ai with the Deep Research model will do this for you easily and will include citations to sources.

Additional websites to research:

Ballotpedia: Offers comprehensive information on elections and candidates.
GovTrack: Tracks legislation and voting records.
OpenSecrets: Provides information on campaign finance.
ImageFX rendering of analyzing vote records
ImageFX rendering of making web images

Include imagery. You can find public domain images of your representative on the GitHub repository (find the correct photo from the alpha-numeric string on their www.congress.gov webpage, e.g., B001307) and you can use AI tools (e.g. ImageFX) to generate images to help illustrate key ideas.

Additional image libraries:

Unsplash
Library of Congress
CC Search
Additional considerations
Ensure the website is digitally accessible. See accessibility support from WordPress.
Include your Representative’s contact information with sample call scripts.
Assess analytics for the website.

By creating a website to hold your elected officials accountable, you can empower your community, promote informed civic engagement, and make a real difference in your local democracy.