How Do I Filter My Advanced Search by State and Local Districts?

If you’ve been using Advanced Search for a while now, you may have noticed that you can filter by Congressional District but not by State Legislative Districts. Unfortunately, the shear number of different districts across the country and the lack of registry material identifying them makes supporting that search unfeasible at the moment.

We’d love to include that search option eventually, and we are currently looking for a good method to do so! Until then, Advanced Search has a couple methods you can use to filter by State and Local Districts.

The simplest method would be to search by Distance. Enter Area: Addresses and Field: Distance. Then in the pop-up, enter an address that is roughly in the middle of the district you are looking in. Set the Relationship to Is Less Than and enter a distance in miles. The system will pull all addresses that are within that distance from the initial address you selected. This can take longer than usual, so expect to wait a few minutes for results.

This method will get you a very general filter and works best with rounder, more compact districts. Once you get your results, you can filter and remove records using Excel.

A much slower, but much more accurate method would be to create a search using each City in the district..

Input each City or Zip Code by entering Area: Address, Field: City, and Relationship: Is. Enter a City and hit Add Rule. Then, hit New Search Group.

Make sure you hit New Search Group between each City or Zip Code you add as a rule. Similar to using Relationship:  Is Any Of, this will let the system search for results that match any one of the “Search Groups” rather than all of them.

Basically, using New Search Group will let you find addresses that are in cities like Scranton or Stamford, rather than Scranton and Stamford.

Hit Run Search and the system will find all records that have an address in any of the cities you entered. If using cities is not accurate enough for what you need, you can also do this using Zip Codes.

If you’re planning on running this specific search frequently, be sure to save it as one of your Saved Searches! It’s much easier than having to reenter every search rule again.