districtry / iowa

How this deployment grew

districtry Iowa launched with the full phase-1 roadmap: every county and its supervisor districts, both chambers of the Iowa Legislature, Iowa's U.S. House delegation, school districts, townships and cities, and ZIP codes and post offices.

The numbers below are measured from the app's own shipped data files every time anything changes — they cannot drift from what the map actually serves. The changelog entries are dated snapshots: each was true on its own date, and none is edited after the fact.

The changelog

• 4 September 2026

  Cedar Rapids joins, and the toggle stops saying ward

  Cedar Rapids is the third Iowa city whose council districts are on the map, and the eight of its nine elected seats that a district can carry are named on the card — each district's own member plus all three at-large members, who represent every district. The toggle is renamed City Council District: Des Moines and Waterloo elect by WARD and Cedar Rapids by DISTRICT, and a generic label has to be one no city is contradicted by. Every card still names the unit exactly as its own city does, and links shared under the old name still work. The boundary is not the city's — Cedar Rapids publishes none. It is LINN COUNTY's, a single service holding two cities' districts separated only by a bare code with no name attached anywhere in it, so the build proves the code every run in both directions: the five polygons must cover Cedar Rapids, and Marion's four must fail to. Without that second half a future swap would put Marion's districts on Cedar Rapids readers' cards under Cedar Rapids labels, and nothing else would notice. The city's own "Find Your District" page points at the county's, which is the city naming the county as the authority for its own lines. The mayor is elected citywide, so she is named in prose rather than on any one district's card — and unlike the other two cities she is read by the scraper anyway, so leaving her off stays a decision the pipeline can show rather than a gap it cannot see. Iowa's other 936 cities still elect councils this map does not draw, and that gap stays open and stated.

• 4 September 2026

  Waterloo joins, and the ward layer becomes a concept

  Waterloo's five council wards ship, with all seven seats it elects to its council — each ward's own member plus both at-large members, who represent every ward — from the city's own council page. That is a second Iowa city naming real people on a district card, where before only Des Moines did. Because it is the SECOND, the two cities are now two entries on one City Council Ward toggle rather than two near-identical layers: adding a city adds an entry, never a layer. Links shared while it was the Des Moines ward layer still work. The city's own map carries councilmember names inside it, and those are still not what the card reads — a roster attached to a boundary is refreshed when the boundary is, so the names come from the council page and the map's are used once, at build time, to check them. Waterloo's mayor is elected by the whole city, so he is named in prose rather than on any one ward's card. Iowa's other 937 cities still name nobody, and that gap stays open and stated.

• 27 August 2026

  Launched

  Ten layers, statewide, each with a sourced boundary: the national tier (county, U.S. House, Iowa Senate, Iowa House); the flagship county-supervisor layer (270 features across 98 of 99 counties, aware of each county's own election plan under Senate File 75); school-district-unified; county-subdivision and municipality (Iowa's civil townships and its 939 incorporated cities); and zip-code and post-office. Every layer with a statewide officeholder source carries a weekly-refreshed roster; where none exists (county, county-subdivision, municipality, and county-supervisor's supervisor names), the card says so and links the official body rather than guessing. Phase 2 — precincts, judicial districts, community colleges, and the county auditor — is next.

Checked on a schedule

Every scheduled job lands its changes as a reviewed pull request — data about real officeholders never ships without a person looking at the diff.

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Written and maintained by Adam Overberg — hello@overberg.co. Corrections are welcome; every one gets a reply. About this project. Report a problem with this page.