Who Serves
Who Serves support
Last updated 3 October 2026.
Who Serves 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 Who Serves 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.
Who Serves 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 some local seats have no name
Federal officers, statewide officers and state legislators are named for every US address. County officers are named in 45 states, for 2,092 of the 3,235 counties and county equivalents: every county in 29 states, and the largest counties in others. Each county name says whether it came from the county itself or from a statewide directory, and when it was last checked. City and town offices are counted but not yet named anywhere, and the app says so rather than guessing. School superintendents are named for Mississippi's county school districts.
The reason is not effort, it is that there is no national machine-readable record of local officeholders. A local name is shown only when a published record supports it, and the app tells you which record that was.
Why there is no rating, score or recommendation
Who Serves 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 Who Serves 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
Free, with or without a subscription
- Looking up any US address, with every government, office and officeholder, each source link and the date each seat was last checked, and your federal election dates
What a subscription adds
- Saving addresses on your device, up to eight
- Recent recorded votes and financial filings for your members of Congress, each linked to the official record
- Addressing a letter to any officeholder on your list: the right title, salutation and official contact route, in your own words
- Sharing the sourced record for an address as plain text
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 until you remove it. To remove them, tap Delete saved addresses from this device at the bottom of the main screen (free, with or without a subscription), or delete the app. 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/whoserves/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.
Who Serves is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.