What you get 

• Elected officials at the federal, state, and county levels of government, as well as U.S. territories and most major cities.
• Officials’ names, the offices they hold, party affiliation for partisan offices, contact information, websites, and social media handles.

How we source our data and keep it up to date

• The Governance Project dataset is sourced directly from state and local government officials, and then put in a standardized format.
• CTCL regularly updates our data after general elections, including the November general election and local elections that occur throughout the year, to ensure that newly sworn-in officeholders are reflected in the data and contact information is up to date.
• In addition to post-election updates, the Governance Project dataset is updated on a weekly basis to reflect changes due to resignation, appointment, special elections, or other circumstances. CTCL utilizes a suite of custom-built alerts and web scrapers that indicate changes in officeholders or government websites.
• Lastly, the Governance Project dataset undergoes both automated validations and manual quality assurance checks throughout the year to ensure internal consistency and data accuracy.

How to access our data

• Our Governance Project data is presently available in XML and tab-delimited .txt files, and contains OCDIDs.
• Coming in 2025, our Governance Project data will be available through our own API. Data in our API will be retrievable by district OCDIDs. We’ll be hosting information sessions with interested users this summer, and beta-testing our API toward the end of this year.
• If you’re interested in learning more about our Governance Project API, please reach out to [email protected] with the subject line “2025 API”.
• If you’re interested in obtaining our data through the other formats listed, please reach out to us here.