Unknown election when querying /civicinfo/v2/voterinfo

[Kevin Coleman]

I'm attempting to query the Elections: voterInfoQuery endpoint and I'm running into some trouble, I'm currently just receiving 400 errors 

errors"=>[{"domain"=>"global", "reason"=>"invalid", "message"=>"Election unknown"}]

 when I attempt to query with an address. Am I doing something wrong? Here's the query that I was using.

curl https://www.googleapis.com/civicinfo/v2//civicinfo/v2/voterinfo?address=520%20South%20Grand%2C%20Los%20Angeles%2C%2090071&key={KEY}

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Jonathan Tomer]

Hi Kevin,

The Google Civic Information API supports future elections only. Since there are no upcoming elections outside Louisiana currently supported by the Google Civic Information API, you will get an error response for any voter info query for addresses outside Louisiana.

Best,

Jonathan Tomer for the Google Civic Information API

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[Margie Roswell]

Would be great to add past elections too, to learn the universe of candidates people were exposed to in the past

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[Jared Marcotte]

Hi Margie -

I think accessing historical election data would be great as a separate API. Personally, I wouldn’t want it a part of the existing API. Many folks had to update their applications this election to include the electionId (5000) to account for a bug(?) in the API. Assuming this electionId continued returning results after the election was over, I could see this being problematic, if not damaging. Even if you add a flag (`&historical=True` or something), I’m still concerned that it would accidentally end up in a production app. As an alternate suggestion, assuming the “Test Election” dataset gets refreshed with the most recent national election data, would that fit your use case?

Thinking about this a bit further, beyond having a larger universe for application testing purposes, I think an historical API would have different queries and structured responses for analysis rather than immediate voter access. I imagine the potential usage statistics for an historical API would be too low for Google to invest resources into it, but, since VIP is an open data project, someone else could develop their own from the raw XML files.

Just my stream-of-consciousness on all this :)

Cheers.

- jkm

[Kevin Coleman]

Hi Jonathan,

Ok that totally makes sense, do you have any idea when the API will be updated with future information? Or whether there will be an option to query the API for legacy info in the future?

Thanks,

Kevin

[Jonathan Tomer]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 2:32 PM, Kevin Coleman <col...@nationbuilder.com> wrote:

Hi Jonathan,

Ok that totally makes sense, do you have any idea when the API will be updated with future information? Or whether there will be an option to query the API for legacy info in the future?

It's impossible to give exact dates because we depend on data being supplied by state and local election officials. However, I can say that even in the best case it's uncommon for us to have data available more than a couple months before an election (because it is rarely published by the election administrator earlier than that). Moreover, availability of information for primaries and state and local elections depends on the state or local election administration deciding to provide data for that election through the Voting Information Project; some states only supply data for major elections (i.e. those that coincide with federal elections).

I can't comment on whether we will supply the ability to look up past elections' data in a future release of the Civic Information API; however, this would be an excellent time to fill out the developer survey that was recently sent to this list and let us know about your use case as well as any other features you'd like to see added.

Thanks!