For the 2020 general election, I created this application to allow Dallas County voters to find their closest polling locations via text message. After sending a trigger word (vote for English or votar for Spanish), the bot asks for the user's ZIP code and responds with three of the closest locations along with their corresponding wait times.
| Text Response in English | Text Response in Spanish |
|---|---|
 |
 |
- Node.js with Typescript
- Express - web server
- SQLite - store location and user data
- Redis - cache calls to geocoding web service
- Twilio - send and receive text messages
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Install Node.js >= 12, SQLite, and Redis
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After cloning the repository, create a file called .env
# .env
# should early voting and/or voting day locations be returned
INCLUDE_EARLY_VOTING_LOCATIONS=true
INCLUDE_VOTING_DAY_LOCATIONS=false
# redis settings
REDIS_HOST=
REDIS_PORT=
# rapid API key for geocoding API
RAPID_API_KEY=
# twilio account SID, authorization token, and telephone number used to send and receive text messages
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=
TWILIO_NUMBER=
- Install dependencies and run the application to create sqlite database
npm i
npm run dev
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Once the console displays "Connected to database", stop the application
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Connect to the SQLite database located in data/db.sqlite and run all queries found in sql/locations.sql and sql/users.sql
npm run build
npm start
Contributions are welcome! I would love to expand this to multiple cities if there is interest.