Rallybase does not produce civic data. Every figure, boundary, name and date on this site came from somewhere public, and this page says where — including what each source does not cover.
The short version
Government and open datasets, read directly. We do not buy voter files, we do not derive your location from your IP address, and we do not write the news we link to. Where a source is thin, the product says so on the page where you would have expected the answer — that is a deliberate rule, and it is why some sections of this site tell you what is missing instead of showing you an empty box.
What we will not do
We never invent a value to fill a gap. If we have not asked, if we asked and got nothing, or if we asked and the request failed, those are three different states and the page tells you which one you are looking at. A zero is a measurement, not a placeholder.
We take no position. Party affiliation is never colour-coded. Bills carry no recommendation. Where a public statistic is genuinely contested, we show the figure and link the competing readings without supplying the sentence that tells you which one to believe.
What you can write to
Every level below is reachable somewhere, and none of them everywhere. The Action Center will not offer you a recipient we cannot help you reach — it names the gap instead — so this is what to expect before you start. Figures measured on the dates shown.
Congress — House, Senate, and the President
How: Their own contact form, on their own site. We hold 539 federal offices and link the site each publishes — 536 of them. We also hold a phone for all 539, and show it, though the composer cannot place a call for you.
Where it stops: Members of Congress publish no public email address — not one of the 539 — and that is how Congress works rather than a gap in our reading, so there is no inbox to write to and no mailto to open. We also do not construct a /contact path from a homepage: a guessed URL that 404s is worse than a real one that needs a second click.
State legislatures and statewide executives
How: Email where the state publishes one, otherwise the office’s own site. 7,543 offices across all fifty states, from OpenStates and the states’ own rosters — 7,419 with an email and 7,539 with a site.
Where it stops: Which of the two you get depends entirely on what each state publishes. Exactly one of the 7,543 publishes no email, no site and no phone; that office is not offered, and the page names it rather than opening a composer with nowhere to send it.
County officers
How: The county’s own site. 1,872 offices across four states — every one of Texas’s 254 counties, 31 in California, 15 in Ohio, one in Pennsylvania.
Where it stops: Forty-six states have no county rows at all. Of the ones we do hold, none publish an email and 497 publish a phone — and a phone alone is not something we will offer you a letter against, because nothing here can place a call. Where that is all we hold, the office is named with its number rather than offered as a recipient. Six county commissions publish a mailing address we have read; the rest do not.
City councils
How: A read roster for nine cities — Austin, Columbus, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, San Antonio and Seattle — 112 seats, 102 of them with an email or their own page.
Where it stops: Nine cities out of the 32,058 places in the country. Everywhere else we have not read a council roster, and where the point you give us is not inside any incorporated city, there is no council to read. The page tells you which of those two it is.
School boards
How: Email where the district publishes one. 9,151 trustees, from AskTED and from districts’ own board pages.
Where it stops: Only 1,210 of those 9,151 — 13% — publish an email or a phone; those sources publish both or neither, so it is the same 1,210 either way. The other 7,941 are people we can name and cannot help you reach, and they are no longer offered as recipients. That is a gap in what the state directory publishes, not in our reading of it.
Governing bodies, by post
How: A mailing address read off the body’s own site, for eleven bodies: the councils of Austin, Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the mayor of Philadelphia, five county commissions, and Austin ISD’s board.
Where it stops: Four more bodies were looked for and their sites refused our reader outright — San Antonio’s and Columbus’s councils, Franklin County’s commissioners, and the LA Unified board. That is a fact about our retrieval, not about those governments, and none of them is claimed to publish nothing.
Speaking at a public meeting
How: Where a body’s own notice says how to sign up, we quote it and draft what you want to say. 122 meetings carry such a notice.
Where it stops: Another 27,056 meetings we hold publish nothing about comment that we have read. Comment is very likely open at most of them — almost every body takes it — and we will not guess at a sign-up process on somebody else’s agenda, so those meetings carry no flow. We never state that a meeting takes no comment. These two figures move with every sync, which is why they carry a date.
We do not post letters for anyone yet. The printing and mail service is not set up on our side, so nothing here can be bought and every route above is a free one you carry out yourself. We also never submit a public comment, never file a records request, and never sign anyone up to speak at a meeting. Those are all acts a citizen performs under their own name, and a platform standing between you and them is a liability to you rather than a convenience.
Every source, and its limits
Grouped by what it answers. Coverage varies by state — the map and the district panel state their own coverage for the place you are looking at, which is more specific than anything this page can say.
Every sitting state legislator in all 50 states, plus territories — names, parties, districts and mailing addresses.
What it does not cover: State level only, and a legislator's current role is inferred from a role history that upstream does not always close out cleanly.
Every district boundary on the map — congressional, state legislative, county, city, and school district.
What it does not cover: City council wards and other sub-city districts are not in TIGER at all. Twelve states run town and township governments that TIGER files separately, and those are not loaded yet.
A server-side address-to-point service. General address entry is not currently connected to the map interface.
What it does not cover: The map currently uses a ZIP code or browser location permission. ZIP results are approximate. The election ballot lookup has a separate address flow; it does not set the map location. We never derive your location from your IP address.
Turning a ZIP code into a place on the map, from boundaries we hold ourselves.
What it does not cover: A ZCTA approximates a ZIP delivery area; it is not a government boundary and no official represents one. About one ZIP in twelve — PO-box-only, single-building, and military APO/FPO/DPO ZIPs — has no tabulation area at all, and we say so rather than guessing a nearby point.
The background map tiles — roads, water, labels — that everything else is drawn on top of.
What it does not cover: The basemap is scenery. Every boundary, district, pin and official on the map is our own data drawn over it, from the sources listed above.
Annual revenue and spending records in Budget, with category breakdowns, fiscal years and the source’s estimation flags.
What it does not cover: These records are not the government’s current adopted budget. Annual samples can omit smaller governments. Budget names the fiscal year and whether amounts were estimated; missing records are not zero spending.
School-system revenue, spending and enrollment used by the school Budget view, including per-pupil figures where available.
What it does not cover: Not a current school-board appropriation or a measure of school quality. This reader has no per-amount estimation flag for school records; enrollment and residents are different denominators.
Federal receipts and outlays reported by Treasury, presented by fiscal year in the federal Budget view.
What it does not cover: Federal accounts only. These are accounting figures, not Census survey estimates, a household tax bill or an assessment of how well money was spent.
What it does not cover: No city ordinances or county orders. Most state legislatures sit for only part of the year, so a quiet period is usually the calendar, not a gap.
What is on your ballot, your polling place, early voting sites and drop boxes.
What it does not cover: Only loaded in the weeks around an election — the Voting Information Project publishes per election, not year-round. Outside that window there is genuinely nothing to show, and we say which.
How the 2024 general election was actually run in 6,461 local election jurisdictions — registered voters, voters who participated, polling places, and poll workers.
What it does not cover: EAVS is self-reported: it is what local election offices told the EAC, not an audit of what they did. Jurisdictions may skip questions, and where one did we store nothing rather than a zero. It is a snapshot of the 2024 general election only — nothing more recent, and no other election. Some states report by township, so several EAVS jurisdictions can sit inside one county.
City council agendas and meeting schedules for cities that use this vendor.
What it does not cover: Only cities on Legistar. Travis County runs CivicClerk and Austin ISD runs BoardDocs, so those are curated by hand — a deliberate choice about maintenance cost, not an oversight.
Population, income, poverty and education figures for every place shown on the map.
What it does not cover: A rolling five-year survey estimate with a margin of error, not a headcount. Small places are sometimes suppressed for privacy, and we show nothing rather than a substitute.
Union density and wage figures on the state labour panel.
What it does not cover: State level only, and union density is an annual estimate from a household sample survey — it carries a margin of error and lags the current year. There is no city or county figure.
Modelled county-level eviction filing estimates with 95% confidence intervals, for 3,143 counties.
What it does not cover: These estimates end in 2018 and begin in 2000 — they describe the past, not the present, and nothing here reflects the pandemic-era moratoria or anything since. They are modelled estimates with confidence intervals, not counts of evictions, and the interval is part of the number rather than a footnote. County level only: no city, tract or block-group figures are loaded, and no information about individual cases or addresses exists here at all.
County-level food access for 3,147 counties — how many people live far from a supermarket, how many of those are low-income or have no car, grocery and convenience store counts, SNAP-authorized stores and SNAP benefits per head.
What it does not cover: The Atlas is a compilation, not a survey: each indicator comes from its own underlying source with its own vintage, so nothing here shares a single date. In this release low access is 2019, store counts are 2020, SNAP-authorized stores are 2023 and SNAP benefits are 2022 — a county has changed since, and the Atlas will not show it. Household food insecurity is published by USDA only at STATE level and as a three-year average, so it is not a county figure and is not stored as one. Nothing here is about an individual household or address.
The revenue and expense lines a nonprofit reported to the IRS on its most recent Form 990.
What it does not cover: Only organisations large enough to file a full 990 or 990-EZ appear. The smallest charities file the 990-N e-Postcard, which reports no figures at all — so a blank here means "not required to report", not "spent nothing". Figures are the organisation’s own filing; the IRS does not audit them before publishing.
Registered nonprofit organizations, their addresses and their stated purpose.
What it does not cover: Being registered is not an endorsement and says nothing about whether an organization is active or well run. Organizations are matched to cities by name, so a spelling difference can leave a real charity unlisted — which is why nothing on this site is ranked by that count.
Which state agency administers TANF and LIHEAP in each of the 50 states and DC, its official application page, and the public enquiries phone number the agency itself designates.
What it does not cover: TWO PROGRAMS ONLY. The other fifteen programs in the registry have no state row here: USDA resets the connection to our identifying client, so SNAP and WIC state directories are unread; Medicaid, CHIP and the unemployment-insurance finder publish their state lists through client-rendered pages with no links in the HTML; and HUD's public-housing-agency directory is behind a form. Those are recorded as `unread` and rendered as our gap, never as an absence in the reader's state. Nothing here is an eligibility rule, an income limit or a benefit amount — this layer records where to apply, never whether you qualify. County-level administration is not loaded at all.
The published minimum wage in each of the 50 states and DC as the U.S. Department of Labor prints it — including the four states that publish more than one rate — the tipped cash wage and tip credit, the indexation mechanism where a state has one, and the state labor agency that takes wage claims, with its official complaint page and public phone number.
What it does not cover: A RATE, NOT A RULE. Nothing here says who is covered by a minimum wage law, which exemptions apply to an occupation, or whether any particular job is owed any particular figure — every state exempts occupations and industries, and DOL's own table says so. Nothing here assesses whether a law was broken: that is the agency's and the courts' decision. Statutory citations are absent for 50 of 51 states because DOL prints none; only Texas's was read at the primary source. NEXT SCHEDULED CHANGES are absent for 50 of 51 because DOL states only Michigan's — an indexed state carries its mechanism quoted, never a computed future number. Local floors cover 67 named cities and counties only, and the surface does not resolve which one an address falls in. Whether a state preempts local floors is established for 7 states at their own statutes and is `unread` for the other 44 — rendered as our gap, never as permission.
Local news coverage for an area, from published journalism.
What it does not cover: Rallybase never writes news and never ranks it by viewpoint. Coverage is genuinely thin outside larger metros, and we say so in the place the articles would have been rather than showing an empty box.
Attribution
Some of these sources ask to be credited in particular words, and two of them require it as a condition of the licence. Those exact words are below. Where a source asks us to state what we are not claiming — that they have not reviewed or endorsed Rallybase — that sentence is here too, because it is true and because a reader should not mistake public data for a government blessing.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau. This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Labor statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieval date not recorded. BLS has not endorsed Rallybase and is not responsible for any figure derived here.
Gromis, Ashley, Ian Fellows, James R. Hendrickson, Lavar Edmonds, Lillian Leung, Adam Porton, and Matthew Desmond. Estimating Eviction Prevalence across the United States. Princeton University Eviction Lab. https://data-downloads.evictionlab.org/#estimating-eviction-prevalance-across-us/. Deposited May 13, 2022.
Election administration data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS), Version 2.0. Figures are self-reported by election jurisdictions. The EAC has not reviewed or endorsed Rallybase.
Food environment data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Food Environment Atlas (July 2025 release). The Atlas compiles indicators from many underlying sources, each with its own vintage. USDA has not reviewed or endorsed Rallybase.
Not a source — nothing on this site is derived from it. Research about the civic information landscape, for readers who want the comparative view we deliberately do not build.
A foundation-funded dashboard scoring civic health for every US county across 27 indicators — local news presence, participation, library use, and more.
Why we link it and do not use it: its scores blend editorial weighting with estimated values for counties missing data. That is a reasonable choice for comparative research and the wrong one for a record; this site shows only what a source actually published. Read their methodology alongside any score.
Found something wrong?
Civic data goes out of date, and some of it was wrong when it was published. If a name, a district or a date on this site does not match the official record, tell us at support@rallybase.org and say what you expected to see. Corrections are made against the official source, not against the report.