What You Get
- Elected officials at all levels of government (federal, state, and local), including legislators and constitutional government officials
- Elected officials from most major US cities
- Many school board, judicial, and special district offices, depending on data availability
- Officials’ names, the offices they hold, party affiliation, contact information, and online presence.
How We Keep Our Data Up-To-Date:
- Custom alerts let us know when officials assume or leave office
- Web scrapers alert us to changes to online government lists of elected officials
- Quarterly hand audits and periodic full data refreshes ensure quality control
The Governance Project uses Open Civic Data Identifiers to tie officeholders and offices to the districts that they serve. This allows the Governance Project to provide, given a user’s address, only relevant information about the elected officials that represent the specific user and helps us ensure our data can be easily integrated with other civic datasets.
The best way to access the Governance Project dataset for free is through the Google Civic Information API.
If you have a project where the Civic API doesn’t meet your needs, you may be able to license our data directly. 501(c)3 non-profits and startups with annual revenue under $2m are eligible to license most data for free. All other organizations are subject to a licensing fee. CTCL maintains a commitment to nonpartisanship in all our work. As such, our datasets are made available to organizations of any tax status or political affiliation who agree to our pricing and usage guidelines.
For information about obtaining raw data in flatfile or XML formats, reach out to us here!
The Governance Project dataset is updated on a bi-weekly basis to reflect the most up to date information available. While the ever-changing nature of elected official data is such that we cannot always update information in real-time, we employ several methods to ensure the accuracy of our elected official data. These systems methods include:
- A suite of custom-built alerts that inform us when elected officials are removed, appointed, or elected
- A suite of web scrapers that alert us when changes are made to government websites that list elected officials
- Quarterly hand audits to ensure quality control for each state’s elected officials as well as period full data refreshes after major elections and as necessary.
If you notice that something is inaccurate, incomplete, or missing from the governance project dataset, please contact [email protected].
For answers to any other questions, access to documentation and data samples, or directions to the best Thai restaurant in Las Vegas please contact [email protected].