COMaps Mission

In 2005, the lack of demographic data and political information on the state of Colorado was lacking due to the lack of easy accessible information on the state representatives and historical election state. This site was designed to provide easier access to information and electoral maps than state agencies were providing to better enable votes to determine who their elected officials were.

This site is in no way affiliated with the state of Colorado or any of the political parties within the state, and uses freely available tools such as Google Maps to present information about the senators and representatives of this state. Only publicly available GIS (Geographic Information System) data was used, and this information varies dependent from location to location. Many efforts have been made to clean the data of any errors and transcribe information previously contained only in print form.

There are a few ways to access the data, dependent on how familiar you are with the political structures in Colorado.

- If you wish to know who your representatives are, the "Find Your District" link will enable you to type in an address and determine your state representatives and U.S. Congressman.

- District maps for every district and county are also available, including some county commissioner maps and the RTD voter districts.

- Each race can also be checked, if you need information about a specific race from 2004.

- And the newest section is Appendices, which are collected lists of information that have been collected from the information already on the website.

Updates

02/07/2011 - Pre Census Work

Nearly all of the 2010 data is in the database. All that is left is updating the link names and the color of the displayed districts. Both of these tasks are tedious.

In more exciting news, the Census 2010 data will be coming online shortly. I hope to make most of it available on the site. If there is anything you want to see, let me know and I will try to put it into the features I'm building. The data sets are gigantic, so I want to trim out some of the less important categories. Oh, and congrats to the Packers!

06/02/2010 - RTD Districts Added

This data has been floating around on the website for quite some time. RTD Districts within each county are now available on the county map pages. There a options to overlay RTD Districts for Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Douglas, Jefferson and Weld Counties, along with the City of Denver and Broomfield.

I make a page this weekend that will work in a similar manner to the State House/Senate pages for the RTD Districts as well, along with a link to a KML download.

5/20/2010 - Adding county commissioner maps

After stalling on the addition of county commissioner districts for ages, I have finally obtained some additional maps. Of course, these additions are not at the optimal time, since redistricting is only a year or two away. You can access these overlays on the respective individual county page, which are listed below. Boulder, Adams, Arapahoe, Archuleta, Jefferson, Douglas, and Yuma Counties are completed, along with the City of Denver. If anyone has access to a paper map instead of the relevant mapping files, please contact me.

I have a few more in my possession, but I have to clean the data to match the Google map system and confirm their accuracy. In terms of population, the process is approximately halfway completed, but there are still many counties without any information available.

5/15/2010 - County elected official database begun

In this update, currently elected officials at the county level have been added to county webpages. This data is not complete and may have errors. I hope to validate and add additional information the over the next month. Also, Yuma County and Archuleta County Commissioner districts are now available on their respective county pages.

As a continual reminder, don't directly embed these pages into campaign websites. I will help any campaign wants to set up their own map, feel free to contact me.

3/15/2010 - Candidates updated

Every candidate currently declared in the Colorado Campaign Finance Database is shown on the site. I'll be adding candidate web pages as time permits. If you do not trust Google to find your campaign site, you can always email me at webmaster@comaps.org to be included.

2/15/2010 - Mobile representative search

There is now a mobile optimized page for searching and finding your elected representatives, available here. It is the same search code as the standard version, but is optimized for smaller resolutions and removes the map. In return for no map, there is more information about each official, including a phone number for their office (I hope) and an email address. I may make changes during the weekend that render it unstable, there will be a beta tag added to the system if I am modifying the code. I have tested it on an Android phone, but anyone on a smart phone (iPhone, Android, Blackberry) is welcome to test the page out and suggest improvements. The search function was quick on my phone. If it is slow on your phone, please let me know. There is still underlying Google code, which I will remove if there are errors that impact reliability.
Additional updates to candidate websites and information has also been included in this update. There are also links to the campaign finance database maintained by the state of Colorado for each candidate. As always, my contact address is webmaster@comaps.org.

12/3/2009 - Clean up and primary data

Primary Time! I have received many notices from candidates and campaigns about adding their name to candidate lists, and I apologize for the delay. I am only one person, and clerical work is not the most pleasant job. However, this weekend the candidate database will have old names removed, new ones added, and I will hopefully confirm which incumbents are running. If any candidate wants their name added, please send me a email with name, party, district and candidate webpage to webmaster@comaps.org. To those who have already, thank you.
As an additional note, many candidate webpages have used the district maps provided here to show the district they are running for. Do not directly embed a page from this site within your webpage, or copy entire pages and host them as your own. Read the Data Availability section for more details, and it is always better to ask if unsure.

11/23/2009 - Appendices of Colorado political data

New features - Appendix data. I've collected so much other data that doesn't really fit easily anywhere else, so I've decided to try an prepare most of it in easy to read formats. The first two are now available from the Appendix links on the side.

Appendix A is list of state legislators from 1996 to 2009, current as of this date. This includes all of the various appointments and resignations I could find, but possible not all of them.
Appendix B is a list of state referendum from 1990 to 2009, along with a brief description of what the amendments were about in case the descriptive title is not descriptive at all.