API Rate Limit Increase

[Jason]

Hey folks, I submitted another request to increase our, very low, rate limit on the API. Are rate limit increases being considered? Presently it's too low to bulk load data for our users, or even service more than 25,000 interactive users in a day. We have almost a million users just in California. I filled out the form and submitted it, can someone please consider the increase of our key? Thank you.

[Google Civic Information API]

Hi There,

Thanks for getting in touch. We've reached out to you directly with some next steps for your request.

Best

The Civic Info API Team

[Jason]

Thank you; I filled out the form, and responded in the Google doc, and usually after I do those two things, I don't hear back. No clarifying questions, no increase, nothing. Can you help this time, please?

[Gabriel Wheaton]

Hi Jason, I'm curious if you ever got a response for this. Trying to see if I should use the Civic API for a new project and it's not clear how consistently it's being supported reading these conversations.

[Civic Info API Quota]

Hi Gabriel,

We evaluate all Civic Info API quota increase requests against our developer guidelines. Sometimes this can take a while at times of high demand but we aim to process every request within 3-4 weeks.

If you'd like us to consider a quota increase for your project, please submit this form and we'll follow up with next steps.

Best

The Civic Info API Team

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[Jason Putorti]

Hi Gabriel, after multiple rounds of forms and back and forth I did get an increased limit, but it wasn't as much as I needed or as much as I know other groups have received. The problem is, election spikes are unpredictable traffic wise for us, and although I did get more, it wouldn't have been sufficient for my user table or a viral event, so I couldn't proceed with my GOTV program. The other, bigger problem is, if you're trying to do anything in advance, the data itself is added at the very last minute in so many cases, I'm talking one day before the election at times; you can see for yourself with the announcement list for when elections are added to the system. Even if I wanted to do reminders a week out, often times I wouldn't be able to do it, because the elections are still not there. A third problem, is, elections that may be only in a single House district, come through as being in an entire state, with no OCDID identifier that can be used to differentiate, for example:

   {
      "id": "11117",
      "name": "Washington Special Election",
      "electionDay": "2026-04-28",
      "ocdDivisionId": "ocd-division/country:us/state:wa"
    },

Only a handful of counties are actually voting, so if you wanted to notify these areas, you'd have to do a separate lookup. In essence you can't fully trust the ocdDivisionId field. The correct approach would be to list the OCD:IDs where there are actual elections.

Maybe these things do not matter for you, in which case you might be good, but they do for me. To this day I do not understand why Google needs to be so aggressive with API limits both hourly and daily for data about voting, consumed largely by civic engagement organizations trying to get people to vote, given the amount of compute Google has and gives away for stuff like Nano Banana.

Jason

[Keith Garner]

This doesn't make sense, why would there be a rate limit on the API? for what purpose? and what is the existing limit? What is the increased limit?

Does google Civics team have the correct exceptions in place to dynamically increase quotas the closer we get to elections? 

I can totally see why there would be API limits *after* an election, but if google is artificially adding rate limits before an election, that defeats the purpose of a civics tool.

[Google Civic Information API]

Hi Keith,

We apply a query limit quota to projects using the Civic Info API to prevent abuse and keep it responsive for all users. You can learn more about the guidelines for the use of the API here.

By default, all projects have a quota of 25,000 queries per day - this isn't dynamic, nor is it specific to any point in the election cycle.

If you anticipate that your project will exceed that quota at some point in the election cycle, you can request an increase through the developer console and we'll evaluate your use-case.

The approval process can take 1-2 months at busy times (especially in the lead up to an election). We recommend you submit your quota increase requests for the November elections no later than the end of August.

We'll ask you to re-submit a justification for the increased quota in advance of the subsequent election to ensure your use-case continues to conform to our guidelines.

Hopefully this answers your query here but feel free to send us any followup questions and we'll do our best to shed some light on them.

Best,

The Civic Info API Team