What is the Civic Information API?

The Google Civic Information API lets developers build applications that display civic information to their users. For any U.S. residential address, you can look up who represents that address at each elected level of government. During supported elections, you can also look up polling places, early vote location, candidate data, and other election official information.

How it works

Our data is based on the political geography of a citizen’s address. This address indicates where a citizen is eligible to vote and who represents them. There are many U.S. elections throughout the year, and both election information and political geography can shift with time. Google assigns every election available in the API an election ID, and the information associated with that ID is intended to be accurate for that election only.

The service is free for data providers, users who access this information, and third parties who use our apps to display civic information on their site. Once you register your project in the Developers Console, you may make up to 25,000 queries per day. If you need additional quota, use the Quotas page in the Developers Console for your project to make a request.

How does Google work with the Voting Information Project?

voterInfoQuery returns data for elections supported by the Voting Information Project. This data includes both official data published and verified directly by a state or local election official along with data collected from official sources by trusted third party partners.

The Voting Information Project is a partnership of state election officials, foundations, and leading technology companies in the US which work together to connect voters with the election information they need to be more engaged citizens. Google is one of the founders and participants in the initiative.

The Ballot Information Project provides comprehensive information on what’s on the ballot that is sourced directly from state and local election officials. The Ballot Information Project team conducts email and phone outreach to thousands of election officials to collect reliable ballot data. The ballot data also undergoes several quality assurance checks, such as verification against official sample ballots and pre-scheduled checks for candidate updates, like withdrawal deadlines, to ensure that the ballot data is accurate. After quality assurance, the data is made available on the Google Civic Information API through voterInfoQuery and is kept up to date through election day.

representativeInfoByAddress and representativeInfoByDivision returns data for federal, state, and local elected officeholders by the Governance Project. This data is sourced directly from government sources and is kept up to date throughout the year. The elected official data is responsive to year-round changes, like resignations and appointments,and is also refreshed after regular and special elections.

Try it out

To start developing with the Civic Information API, take a look at our reference documentation and our Voter Information tool, built using the API.