Local government officials have a direct impact on our lives. But all too often, we have very little information about them when it comes time to vote.
Not anymore.
Where We Come In
We give the public access to the information they need to make informed decisions at the ballot box.
Through our partnerships with tech companies like Google and Facebook, voters have found answers to questions like:
- What’s on my ballot?
- What do my elected officials do?
- Who are my elected officials?
- How can I contact my representatives?
Voters have accessed CTCL’s data over 250 million times since 2012.
How elections and governments are structured, and how that information is made available, varies greatly across states, counties, and municipalities. We source official information from thousands of elections offices across the country in whatever form it is available.
We start with both automated and manual collection of information that elections offices publish online.
We also reach out to elections offices directly to collect and confirm any information not found on the web.
Whether exported from a database or sent via fax or USPS, we collect information in whatever form it’s in!
Once we’ve collected our primary sources, we get to work putting it into a consistent format. In addition to standardizing core data fields like electoral districts, offices, parties, and names, we also provide:
This includes the office’s level, role, and a standardized category for comparison across states. We also make short office descriptions available to make it easier to understand what each office is responsible for.
This includes websites, social media profiles, mailing and email addresses, and more, where available. This information helps voters quickly access detailed information about their candidates, and aids constituents’ efforts to easily contact their elected representatives.
After collection is complete and the data has gone through an initial quality assurance check, it is run through an internal import system to our master database. Through the import process, officeholders, candidates, contests, and offices are all assigned stable universally unique identifiers. The importer also performs two additional crucial functions:
All of our data can be linked to political geography via Open Civic Data Identifiers (OCDIDs) for both electoral district and jurisdiction. OCDIDs are human and machine readable unique identifiers that help connect offices and candidates to constituents’ and voters’ addresses. These OCDIDs are assigned during the import process.
We have ongoing and scheduled quality assurance checks to ensure our datasets are accurate and up to date. Additionally, our import process is designed to catch a variety of issues including duplications, mismatches between offices and electoral districts, and missing or mis-formatted information.
CTCL maintains a commitment to nonpartisanship in all our work. As such, our datasets are made available to organizations who agree to our usage guidelines. We make our civic data available in a variety of ways, including:
- In-house and partner APIs
- XML files
- Tab-delimited .txt files
Fill out the Data Request Form