Notice of Turndown of the Representatives API

[Google Civic Information API]

We will be turning down the Representatives API next year in April 2025. This API gives developers the ability to identify the elected representatives for a residential address or division. When we first launched the API 10 years ago, there was limited offering of political representation data in the civic information ecosystem. Today, there are alternate providers who are able to serve authoritative representation data directly to developers. 

Some key points:

• Both representativeInfoByAddress and representativeInfoByDivision methods will be turned down next year in April 2025. 

• Until the turndown date, the Representatives API will be functional and supported as usual.

• After the turndown date, the Representatives API will not be available.

• There is no impact on Elections or Divisions APIs, and they will continue to be supported. 

• There are other providers who offer political representation data. The current Representatives API data comes from the Governance Project. 

• To ease the transition to other providers of representation data, Google will launch a new method under the Divisions API which can be used to look up Open Civic Data Identifiers (OCD-IDs) for a given residential address. The OCD-ID can then be used to lookup representatives in other providers’ datasets. This launch is planned by Sep 2024 to give time for integration in your applications by the April 2025 turndown date. 

Please reach out to us if you have questions regarding this notice.

- Civic Information API team

[Nicholas Roberts]

Can we get the list of the Representative API alternative providers please before the changes?

Refactoring Representative API code and data will take some time and I would like to know before we are deep into election season

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[J. Albert Bowden]

who are these other providers?

Sent from Gmail Mobile

[Eric Rosenfeld]

Who are the other providers that offer political representation data that caused this turndown?

[Anthony Spaelti]

They said the data is coming from Governance Project. 

You can find more information here: https://www.techandciviclife.org/our-work/civic-information/our-data/governance-project/ 

Check out their website on when their own API is ready and how to obtain tables with elected official data until then.

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[Google Civic Information API]

Thanks for the questions - As we noted in our post, the current Representatives API data comes from the Governance Project. You can find more information in that link.

[Mike Freeman]

Anthony, is the techandciviclife api functional? It says that it's coming, but doesn't have a firm timeline. 

[Nicholas Roberts]

• Our Governance Project data is presently available in XML and tab-delimited .txt files, and contains OCDIDs.

followup question: is the XML and txt files available today? 

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[Jim Crist]

OK, by "turndown" you mean you're "dropping support for", right?  What I need is the ability to pass the API an address and retrieve the state and country district numbers.  Will that still be supported?  Any current progress on the redistricting that occurred in Wisconsin this past February?  Our primary is Tuesday...thanks!!!

[Google Civic Information API]

For questions about the Center for Tech and Civic Life's Governance Project API, you can reach out to da...@techandciviclife.org with the subject line “2025 API”. Their team is best suited to answer your questions about timeline and xml availability.

Regarding Google’s turndown, yes, we will no longer support the Representatives API after April 2025. However, to support the transition, Google will be launching a new method under the Divisions API - it will allow the ability to look up Open Civic Data Identifiers (OCD-IDs) for a given residential address. The new method will be available towards the end of September 2024. Hope that helps! 

- Google Civic Information API team