Data Sources &
Editorial Standards
Every number, name, and party label on SearchMyRep traces back to a specific public source. This page lists all of them: what each one covers, how often it's refreshed, and what we do when something's wrong.
Senators & Representatives
Everything about current members of Congress — biography, committee assignments, sponsored legislation, term history, party — comes directly from the official government record, not a third-party aggregator.
The authoritative federal source: member biographies, term history, sponsored and co-sponsored legislation, committee assignments, and official contact information for every current member of the House and Senate.
Official campaign finance and election-results data: vote totals, candidate filings, and fundraising figures for federal races.
Matches a ZIP code or street address to its congressional and state legislative district boundaries — the same official boundary data used for redistricting.
Governors & state legislators
State-level data is harder to standardize than federal data — there's no single "Congress.gov" for all 50 states — so we combine a live API with static, sourced reference facts that don't change often enough to need daily re-fetching.
The leading open-data project for state legislatures: names, districts, party, and contact information for all ~7,400 state senators and representatives nationwide.
The fixed U.S. House seat count and Electoral College vote count for every state, set once per decade by the census. Combined with each state's own constitution/statute for its legislature's chamber names, chamber sizes, and term lengths.
Candidates & upcoming races
No single government API tracks declared candidates for every governor's race in real time, so candidate data is cross-checked across multiple independent sources rather than taken from just one.
Each state's Wikipedia gubernatorial-election page is actively tracked by many editors in real time and is the primary source for declared candidates, primary results, and presumptive nominees ahead of November.
A secondary, cross-checking source for candidate names ahead of an election — most useful closer to Election Day, when official voter-information data becomes available.
Because these are independent sources describing the same real people, candidate records are matched by a normalized version of each name rather than exact text — this is also what lets us automatically clean up a stale or duplicate entry once a primary resolves, instead of it sitting there indefinitely.
Photos & cross-referenced IDs
Official member photos, and the lookup that links a member's Congress.gov record to their OpenSecrets campaign-finance profile, come from the unitedstates/congress-legislators project — a public-domain dataset maintained by civic-tech volunteers and used by many nonpartisan government-transparency tools, not just this one.
How we handle the data
We don't editorialize
SearchMyRep displays facts sourced from the APIs and pages listed above — biographies, votes, dates, dollar figures. We don't add commentary, rank officials, or characterize their records.
We don't accept advertising or sponsorship
No campaign, PAC, or advertiser pays for placement, and none influences how a page is written or which candidates appear. Every candidate meeting our inclusion criteria for a race is listed, regardless of party.
Party labels come from the source, not from us
A member or candidate's party affiliation is whatever their official source record says (Congress.gov, OpenStates, or the state's own election filing) — we don't independently classify anyone's politics.
Corrections are handled promptly
If something is wrong — an outdated title, a misattributed vote, a candidate who's dropped out — it's usually because a source hasn't been re-synced yet, not because of manual editing. Report it and we'll check the underlying source and refresh it.
See something that's wrong or out of date?
Tell us which page and what looks off — we'll trace it back to the source.
Report a correction →