At CTCL we believe that every American should be able to easily access accurate, trustworthy information about their government. That’s why the Civic Information team builds nonpartisan datasets of candidates and office holders, and then makes that information available online in the places that voters are most looking for it. In 2022, our data was used in a variety of different ways to increase civic engagement and advance understanding of the role government plays in our lives.

Connecting Americans with Civic Information

Our Ballot Information Project (BIP) data, a nationwide dataset of candidate information down to the local level, was available through the CTCL API, which allowed nonpartisan civic engagement organizations to build custom tools to connect people with the information they need to make informed decisions on their ballots.

Although we don’t collect personal information from API users, we know that together, our partnerships resulted in over 480,000 searches through our API, including:

• 258,160 unique users who viewed their ballots through Vote.org’s tool.
• 200,000 users who looked at contests through ActiVote’s ballot lookup tool. ActiVote even became Apple’s App of the day on November 8!

Rock the Vote used the BIP dataset for a ballot endorsement tool that provided over 47,000 users with information on 9,444 unique candidates. The tool collected endorsement data spanning 633 unique endorsing organizations.

Building on our years-long partnership with Google, our data was also published through the Google Civic Information API, making it available to millions of voters across the country.

Beyond elections, our Governance Project dataset of office holders was available through the Google Civic Info AP and powered Google’s Knowledge Panels, which help Americans find accurate information about their elected officials. Our team works year-round to monitor and update our data so Americans can always access the most up-to-date information about who represents them.

Data Insights

This year our data not only educated people about their candidates and elected officials, but it enabled researchers to discover key insights about government, elections, and representation.

This year our data fueled several exciting research projects:

• Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School used our Local Office Index dataset–a nonpartisan collection of plain language descriptions of what state and local government offices are responsible for–to support their research on the duties of local election officials.
• Our previous research on the demographics of candidates and elected officials continued to make the news and push forward efforts to build a more reflective democracy.

What’s Next

Just because it’s an odd year doesn’t mean there aren’t elections! The Civic Information team will be collecting and publishing ballot information for local and state elections throughout 2023. We are about to embark on a full refresh of our elected officials dataset and an update to the Reflective Democracy dataset. If you are interested in using our data this year, send us an email at [email protected].

The Civic Information team also has a new Director: Sarah Berlin, who previously worked at CTCL from 2015-2017 and most recently served as the Senior Director of Election Administration at Democracy Works, has come on board as the Director of Civic Information. She’s excited to be back at CTCL and to start laying the groundwork for 2024.

As we get ready for the next big federal election year, the team will be looking for new ways to expand the reach of our data, opportunities to produce research that inspires action, and ways to support CTCL’s other programs.