Polarus

Your North Star for Every Election. Polarus is your personalized guide to voting in Texas, designed to help you view your voting ballot, find polling locations, and understand ballot measures.

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Inspiration

The first election I ever voted in, I had no idea what I was getting into. Obviously I knew who the president elects were but the state bills on the ballot as well as local electorial options left me searching desperately for any crumb of information i could glean to do my part as an "informed voter." Since that day I've been mulling over how to make political information more accessible to the working class. A 40 hour work week and minimal coverage leaves local elections wildly overlooked despite their position as the foundation for our country's leadership.

With the launch of Polarus, we the people finally have a guiding light to assist us in our voting needs.

What It Does

Polarus gathers information about your Texas Legislators and the bills they pass, presenting said information according to the user's preferences and relevant representatives. This allows the user to make informed decisions about the people representing them in office.

How We Built It

This tech stack has four parts.

  1. A Python-based webscraper gathers information from the official Texas Legislative site into a dictionary to be sorted into a database.

  2. The data pipeline uses SQLAlchemy to integrate the Python with the database and MySQL to process, relate, and store the data.

  3. The data then gets requested by the website using Flask.

  4. Where it is presented with our wonderful celestial-themed interface, crafted using React and Google Gemini.

Challenges We Ran Into

In the past 24 hours, we encountered a few challenges. Finding consistent yea/nay data for each bill proved difficult, so we've had to adjust our approach to stay on track with our timeline. Working with AI to build the website also presented some frustrations, as it occasionally made unintended changes. Additionally, the website deployment process was a bit nerve-wracking; we spent a considerable amount of time trying to deploy the HTML, but unfortunately, it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

  • Creating a cohesive application from top to bottom
  • Building a full database while learning how to use MySQL and SQLAlchemy
  • Building an app that doesn't store a user's data past the location request, which is optional

What We Learned

  • How a tech stack actually works
  • More in-depth tools for web-scraping
  • How to use MySQL and SQLAlchemy and more about how to work with relational databases
  • The complexities of creation to live deployment when it comes to using Google's AI Studio

What's Next For Polarus?

Our team will be adding a bunch of features (such as tracking legislator's votes on different bills) and eventually expanding services across the country. The future for Polarus is to be for all of us.

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