Home Rule
Home Rule support
Last updated 15 September 2026.
Home Rule tells you which governments have authority over an address and who currently holds office inside them, with the source for every name and the date somebody last checked it.
Reporting a name that is wrong
This is the most important thing on this page, and it is the report we most want to receive.
Local offices change hands constantly and almost nobody publishes it in a form software can read. Somebody resigns in March and a board appoints a replacement at a meeting with four people in the room. If Home Rule is showing the wrong person, it is worth telling us, and here is the fastest route:
- Open the government's own page first. Every card in the app links to it. That page is what we check against, and it is also the quickest way for you to confirm who currently holds the seat.
- Then write to us with the office, the county or city, and the link to the page that shows the current holder. A link is worth more than a name on its own, because a name alone cannot be published: no claim goes into this app without the government's own record behind it.
Corrections go into the curated data and ship in the next update.
Why a seat says it has not been checked
When a seat reads "Not checked since 4 March. May have changed", that is deliberate and it is not an error.
Home Rule will not print a name as current once the last verification is old enough that the seat may have turned over without anybody noticing. How long that takes depends on how closely an office is watched: a year for a US Senator, whose death would be on every front page in the country, and sixty days for a water or drainage district, which is often appointed rather than elected and reported on by nobody.
Most directories print the old name confidently and are quietly wrong for a year. This app would rather tell you it does not know.
Why it only shows federal and state offices where I live
County, city and school seats are confirmed in Mississippi today. Everywhere else in the United States, Home Rule returns your federal and state offices, and names the local governments it knows have authority over your address without claiming to know who sits in them.
The reason is not effort, it is that there is no national machine-readable record of local officeholders. Every county, municipal and school seat in this app carries a name because a person opened that government's own website and read it. States are added as each is confirmed that way, never estimated.
Why there is no rating, score or recommendation
Home Rule shows the record and you do the judging. There is no rating, no score, no grade, no pros and cons, and no endorsement, and this will not be added later.
Where candidates appear, the app shows the complete official field from the election authority's own qualified list, or it shows nothing at all. Showing some of the candidates in a race is campaigning, however neutral the wording around it looks.
Elections
The dates in the app are the federal general elections, which are fixed by statute rather than announced: the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, in even-numbered years.
State primaries, city and school elections, runoffs and special elections are set by state law and local charter, they genuinely differ, and Home Rule does not guess them. For those, your county election office or Secretary of State is the authority. Turning up on the wrong day because an app was confident is the single worst thing this app could cause.
Subscriptions
What is free
Looking up any US address, as often as you like; every government, every office and every officeholder; every source link and the date each seat was last checked; and your federal election dates. These are free forever, with or without a subscription.
What a subscription adds
- Saving addresses, up to eight
- Notice when a seat changes hands or stops being verified
- Sourced notices of what these governments have done
- Addressing a letter to the officeholder who decides the thing
- Exporting a sourced record
Managing or cancelling
There are two plans, a monthly one and a yearly one, and you can switch between them at any time. The current price of each, and its billing period, are shown on the subscription screen inside the app. They are read from the App Store for your country rather than repeated here, because a figure printed on a web page is wrong in every storefront that prices differently and wrong everywhere the day the price changes.
The subscription is billed by Apple, not by us, and it renews until cancelled. Cancel or change plan on your device: Settings → your name → Subscriptions. Cancelling there stops the next charge and you keep access until the period you have paid for ends.
Apple's own guide is at support.apple.com, and refunds are handled by Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot see your payment details or issue a refund ourselves, because the purchase never passes through us.
Restoring a purchase
On a new device or after reinstalling, open the subscription screen and tap Restore a subscription. There is no account to sign in to: nothing about you is stored anywhere but your own device, so restoring asks Apple what your Apple ID owns.
Your saved addresses
Looking up an address never saves it. Saving one is a separate, deliberate action, and what it writes stays on your device. Delete the app, or clear its data, and it is gone. There is nothing held on our side to ask us to delete.
An address already saved on your device stays readable whether or not a subscription is active. What a subscription buys is saving new ones, not reaching what is already yours.
Privacy
The full policy is at carrierpress.com/homerule/privacy. In short: there is no account, no analytics and no server of ours. The address you type goes to the US Census Bureau geocoder to find your districts and is not kept.
Contact
One person reads that, so a reply may take a few days.
Home Rule is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.