Tracking your elected officials

June 12, 8:38 AMSalt Lake Independent ExaminerPoppy Moreno

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US Congress

Now days it's much easier to track your elected officials or contact them, but it does help to know where to look.

All Utah senators and representatives are on Facebook.  If you don't already have an account for yourself, you can create one and then use it to say "hi."  Many state legislators are also on Facebook.

In all interactions you should be polite and professional, even when stating a disagreement.  As the old saying goes, you are able to get farther with honey than vinegar. 

Jason Chaffetz and Rob Bishop have setup accounts as regular people so you can interact with them just like any other friend. 

Orrin Hatch, and Robert Bennett can be added as a friend, but they have posting and link sharing disabled on their pages.  You can still find where they have made a post and leave a comment.

Jim Matheson has a "fan page."   Jim Matheson allows you to write posts on his page, but the link sharing feature is disabled.  You can still share links in a post or comment, but you can't attach links so they embed news article and video neatly on his page.

Congress.org is an excellent resource to find out who your elected officials are by simply putting in your zip code and address.  You only need an address or extended zip code, if you need to figure out who your officials are at the state level.  Congress.org is also an excellent resource to get your elected officials mailing address, and Congress.org has an online form to assist you with sending email.

You contact senators and representatives for federal issues, and elected officials at the state level for state issues.

Congress.org is not a good resource for tracking bills in Congress.  They will send you updates on some of the bills going through Congress, but they won't send you updates on all the bills you may want to track.  For tracking bills there's Govtrack.us.  You can create an account on Govtrack.us and then create trackers for specific subjects, or trackers for specific bills.  Govtrack.us also provides JavaScripts for bills so you can embed a specific tracker for a  bill on a web page. 

You can also find out who your elected officials are on Govtrack.us , but Govtrack.us does not provide a user friendly contact tool.  Govtrack.us does provide a district map.

The Federal government provides a service called Thomas.gov, which is less user friendly than Govtrack.us.  Thomas.gov also creates dynamic links for many pages, making it difficult to link to bills and share them. 

If you want to find our who is financing your elected officials, check out OpenSecrets.org.