Now, with more data!

For the past few months, The Cicero team has been adding to our growing list of local elected official and legislative district data in the United States. If you’re a current Cicero API user, you may have already noticed more local data being returned as we added new jurisdictions. We have officially completed this expansion, and we’re excited to announce that you can now access data for 31 new cities and counties!

 

Good local legislative information is hard to find.

Adding localities to the database is a request we get frequently, but sometimes it’s easier said than done. Some city and county legislatures don’t have the resources or staff to keep legislator contact lists updated, leading to information that’s hard to find. In addition, acquiring actual district boundaries is a huge challenge; in many cases at the hyper-local level, this information does not exist in an ingestible format (hello PDF maps!). To complete this expansion, we put a team in place specifically dedicated to tracking down this information, and in some cases, digitizing district boundaries of our own.

 

But it’s as important as ever.

The scarcity of accessible local elected official and legislative district data in the United States is unfortunate. While contacting your representatives at the State and National level is important, it is often legislation at the local level that has a direct impact on people. For this reason, we believe strongly in helping to make this information available, and are continuing to work to try to maintain more of it.

 

And, yes, it’s free!

For existing API customers, this data will not cost any additional credits; you can simply continue to use the API as you have been. The only difference is that data at the local level will now be returned for the places above. If you aren’t yet an API customer, and are interested in trying it out, you can sign up for a free trial here, or contact us about alternate options for accessing this data. You can also look up your own elected officials with our easy to use address-based free search tool.

Have questions? As always, feel free to shoot us an email at cicero@azavea.com or tweet @CiceroAPI.