Ted Henderson knows the inefficiencies of Capitol Hill all too well. But after seeing how technology can impact democracy, the former Congressional staffer set out to build an app that would change the relationship between representatives and their constituents. It’s a badly needed disruption of old-school pagers as the Hill’s information pipeline–and it just might work.

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Capitol Bells recently launched as a web app, eight months after Henderson’s creation first landed on smartphones. The app lets users upvote popular bill opinions–and then compares them to your personal district representative’s record.Users can champion or condemn upcoming bill “Motions” and add a blurb of commentary for others to upvote, Reddit-style.

Get enough support and your fiery Motion rockets to the top of your district’s page–or the even the pan-district Top Trending page. But the point isn’t to preach within Capitol Bells’ choir.

“The real point is to reach out to friends who aren’t really engaged in politics,” Henderson says. “You can reach out to them on Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter and say ‘Hey, there’s this bill and here’s what I think about it and you should act on it.’”

Best of all, the web app lets you compare your “voting record” with that of your representative, along with the rest of the folks in your district. Requiring users to “vote” yay or nay on bill Motions they support/condemn lets Capitol Bells compare apples to apples between users, communities, and politicians. But the way users phrase their blurb justifying their position is important to drawing new users to Capitol Bells: Few people know what “Vote yes on HR 499” means but everyone understands “I support the legalization of marijuana.”

Henderson first envisioned Capitol Bells when he saw the groundswell of anti-SOPA momentum. As a staffer for Rep. Dale Kildee (D-MI) on Capitol Hill at the time, he saw phone lines and email blow up to stop SOPA–and realized that the anti-SOPA effort was a super-effective grassroots movement thanks to support infrastructure from the EFF, Google, and Wikipedia. He wants us, the people, to be able to do it again.

Shortly after his congressman retired from office, Henderson started coding what would become the Capitol Bells smartphone app, which Henderson says was always “the egg” for the web app to follow.