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Linux Solutions for Zip Codes and Congressional Districts?

Posted by Cliff on from the powered-by-political-penguins dept.

davidmcn asks: "There is an overabundance of solutions available for the Microsoft brand of operating systems which allow the mapping of zip-codes to congressional districts. However, I work for a small consulting firm that works primarily with Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL, and would like to find a way to take address information, and create mailings based on Congressional Mappings. Does anyone know of a solution that is available for a linux enviroment? Even something as simple as a list of Congressional Districts and all zip codes underneath them would suffice."

3 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No by Perdo · · Score: 3, Informative

    A zip code refrence is available at:

    http://www.house.gov/writerep/

    That is easy. I belive he wants a voter registration database for the districts themselves...

    Mass mailings are Spam.

    Keeping an individual specific private database is Privacy invasion. Can I call up his consulting firm and ask them what they know about me? Can I have myself removed? Would anyone realisticly opt-in to this? no. 99% would opt out.

    Walking into Kragen Auto Parts I'm pissed that I can't just pay for my parts and leave. No, they keep a damn database. They know everything they've sold me for the past 5 years. Problem is I've only benn shopping ther for 2 years. The database is cataloged by phone numbers. The jerkoff that had my phone number wrote bad checks all over town.

    So not only are there databases everywhere about me, most of them are entirely wrong. Kragen can't delete the database entry until they get paid. I get hasseled just because I want a battery.

    Databases are privacy invasive bullshit.

    Political database... what the hell is this? 1984?

    --

    If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.

  2. Some sources by dagnabit · · Score: 3, Informative



    I ran "zip codes" "congressional districts" through Google and got back a bunch of links.

    This place seems to have zip code info sliced several ways, including congressional districts, for a fee.

    This place seems to specialize in providing info like this as well...

    </karma whoring>

    With the yearly redistricting that some/all states do, it's probably easiest to purchase the info. Perhaps even from the Post Office themselves... congressional district info seems to be a component field that they track anyway... call the National Customer Support Center at 1-800-238-3150. Hours of operation are 7:00 AM through 5:30 PM CT.

  3. Easy by benh57 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Using google I found this in about 30 seconds:

    Congress Merge offers tables linking zip codes to congressional and/or state legislative districts and congressional databases Data can be provided either as a text (flat) file or an Access database

    So there you go.. A flat text file could easily be imported into mysql surely.