Elections Data & Voter Information

US elections data is balkanized across thousands of county clerks; the FOSS / non-profit ecosystem is what stitches it together. Pair with Civic Tech Overview, Call Your Rep, Open Data, and Civic Organizations.

Election results data (free / FOSS)

• ★ ★ OpenElections — MIT; the canonical FOSS US election-results project. Volunteer-driven; collects, standardizes, and publishes precinct-level results from all 50 states. Data on GitHub by state; releases as CSVs. Funded by Knight, Sloan, etc. The default for any serious US election-data work.
• ★ MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL) — free; harmonized historical US election results; academic-grade.
• Dave Leip's US Election Atlas — paid for full data; canonical historical-results reference.
• Edison Research — paid; the AP/NYT-aligned election-night data feed; commercial.

Legislator + bill data (free / FOSS)

• ★ ★ OpenStates — MIT; state-legislature data as code. Bills, votes, legislators, committees across all 50 state legislatures. Run by the Plural Policy team (formerly OpenGov Foundation lineage). Free API, daily-refreshed; CSV / SQLite dumps available. The single most-useful civic-data API in the US.
• ★ GovTrack — partially open; tracks the US Congress; bill text, votes, ratings; Joshua Tauberer's project; long-running.
• ★ ProPublica Congress API — free for non-commercial; bills, votes, member data; high-quality.
• ★ Congress.gov bulk data — free; the Library of Congress official source; GovInfo XML feed.
• EveryPolitician (Poplus) — free; international legislator data; archived but historically important; the data lives on Wikidata now.

Voter info & ballot lookup

• ★ Vote.org — non-profit; free; voter registration, polling-place lookup, ballot information; the most-used voter-info tool in the US.
• ★ BallotReady — free for voters, paid services for orgs; full ballot lookup ("what's actually on my ballot for this race?"); covers down-ballot races that other tools miss.
• ★ Vote411 (League of Women Voters) — free; nonpartisan ballot-info; candidate Q&A.
• TurboVote (Democracy Works) — free; voter registration + reminders; embedded by many universities and employers.
• Rock the Vote — free; voter registration; long-running; partner-API for embedding registration.
• Civic Information API (Google) — free; polling places + representatives; deprecated end-of-2024, no replacement.

Voting-rights / election-protection

• ★ Election Protection 866-OUR-VOTE — non-profit; free hotline; Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
• EAC.gov — federal Election Assistance Commission; voting-equipment certifications; free reports.
• Verified Voting — non-profit; free; nationwide voting-equipment + audit-practice tracking.

Open / FOSS voting machines (research / academic)

• ★ VotingWorks — non-profit, FOSS; the only OSS voting-machine project with actual jurisdiction deployments (Mississippi, New Hampshire pilots). MIT-licensed. Builds VxAdmin, VxScan, VxMark.
• STAR-Vote / Helios / Microsoft ElectionGuard — academic / cryptographic-voting projects; mostly research-shaped.

International

• ★ Democracy Club (UK) — non-profit; FOSS; UK candidates + polling stations; election leaflets archive.
• Demokrasi (various Latin-American projects, often Decidim-adjacent).
• mySociety / TheyWorkForYou — UK Parliament tracker; FOSS; see mySociety.
• Abgeordnetenwatch (Germany) — non-profit; tracks Bundestag votes and member positions.

Honest take (2026)

• OpenElections + OpenStates are the two indispensable APIs for any US elections / civic-data work. Build on them; their licenses (MIT / open data) let you.
• The Google Civic Information API was a quiet but important piece of infrastructure; its deprecation has pushed work back to BallotReady / Vote.org / TurboVote-shaped APIs. None has fully filled the gap.
• VotingWorks is one of the most important under-the-radar civic-tech projects in the US — actual voting infrastructure, FOSS, deployed.
• Mis/disinformation tools (election-rumor monitoring, Election Integrity Partnership-shaped work) collapsed politically post-2023 and is largely defunded; treat 2026 as a rebuilding year.

Pick this if…

• You're building an elections-data product: OpenElections (results) + OpenStates (legislators).
• You want to register voters / send ballot reminders: Vote.org or TurboVote partner API.
• You need full-ballot info, including local races: BallotReady or Vote411.
• You're a journalist tracking state legislatures: OpenStates.
• You want to support actual FOSS voting infrastructure: VotingWorks (donate).
• Tracking UK Parliament: TheyWorkForYou (mySociety).