HotBillsNearYou.com

Interact with local legislation Tinder-style and meet your future soulmate at the same time

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Inspiration

We were inspired by dating apps like Tinder and wanted to apply that engaging, gamified interface to a less exciting but equally important topic: legislation. We realized that most people don't engage with bills because they're intimidating and boring, so we asked: what if we made voting on legislation feel fun and intuitive? Our goal was to expand access to civil engagement for all without the biases of bill proposers or political parties getting in the way.

What it does

HotBillsNearYou is a swipe-based legislation voting app that makes civic engagement engaging. Users:

  • Swipe through bills from their state and nearby states (like/dislike)
  • Have an easy-to-read summary of each bill with links to the full bill if the user wants to learn more
  • Are not able to see the individual proposer of the bill or their political party affiliation, to truly challenge the users to think critically about changes to their communities
  • Build a political profile based on their votes (tracked on a 0.0 left ↔ 1.0 right scale)
  • View their complete voting history with filtering
  • See bill details, summaries, and state/party information
  • Get matched with like-minded voters in their state
  • Access official PDF texts for bills they're interested in

How we built it

We built a full-stack application using:

  • Frontend: Next.js 16 + React 19 + TypeScript with Framer Motion for smooth swipe animations
  • Backend: Python Flask with JWT authentication and Supabase for the database
  • API Integration: LegiScan API to fetch current legislation across multiple states, Sinch API to send fax
  • Matching: Custom ELO algorithm to rate bills and user_bias algorithm to track political positions based on voting
  • PDFs: pdfplumber for bill text extraction and Google Generative AI for bill summaries
  • Database: Supabase with Row-Level Security for user data protection

Challenges we ran into

  • LegiScan API complexity: Learning the API structure and handling rate limits while fetching bills across multiple states
  • PDF text extraction: Parsing inconsistently formatted bill PDFs and extracting meaningful content

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were able to integrate an old system (Fax) into a modern framework
  • Implemented custom ELO algorithm and matching algorithm
  • Coordinated pull requests and minimized merge conflicts
  • Excellent UI and incredible UX and built an advertising space
  • Able to consume a total of 20 feastable bars

What we learned

  • How to create a seemingly boring experience turn into a genuinely entertaining and socially beneficial result
  • Sending a fax is still a relevant way to reach people
  • You can find your partner in any situation

What's next for HotBillsNearYou

  • Add a way for users to interact with others of differing perspectives in a low-pressure environment
  • Forum feature to have specific discussions about specific bills
  • Expanded state coverage
  • Dedicated live meet feature to have civil discussions

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