Every fact on ThePolitibase — every vote, bill, filing, committee assignment and dollar figure — comes from one of the sources below. Federal records come from the government’s own systems; state legislature records come from the two open-data projects listed under State legislatures. We do not take factual data from news outlets, partisan databases, opposition research, or commercial political-data vendors.
One thing on this site is not a fact we publish but a link we surface: the headlines shown beside member and bill pages. Those are links out to publishers, listed separately below. Nothing on ThePolitibase is derived from them.
Primary sources
Congress.gov API
Operated by the Library of Congress. Provides bills, members, votes, committee meetings, amendments, summaries, and policy areas. Documentation.
senate.gov
The U.S. Senate publishes XML files for every roll-call vote at senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/. We parse these directly to get authoritative tallies and result strings.
clerk.house.gov
The Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House publishes a yearly index of roll-call votes plus an XML file for each. We use this when Congress.gov’s API doesn’t include a particular procedural vote.
FEC OpenFEC API
The Federal Election Commission. Source of all campaign finance data: contributions, expenditures, candidate filings, and committee filings. Documentation.
State legislatures
Open States / Plural Open
An open-data project covering legislators, bills and committees in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. It is the source of every state legislator profile on this site — names, districts, chambers, parties and committee assignments. Open States is published by Plural Policy at pluralpolicy.com/open. Attribution also appears on each page carrying their data.
LegiScan
Source of state-level roll-call votes and bill status, where available.
Legislative Datasets by LegiScan LLC are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © LegiScan LLC. Licence terms: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. The licensor offers the material as-is and makes no representations or warranties concerning it. ThePolitibase has modified this material: records are reshaped into this site’s own data schema, combined with records from the other sources listed on this page, and presented alongside our own plain-language descriptions. LegiScan does not endorse ThePolitibase or this use of its data.
Identifier mappings
unitedstates.github.io
An open-source project maintained by civic technologists — not a government body, which is why it sits in its own category rather than among the primary sources above. It provides identifier mappings (bioguide IDs, LIS IDs, FEC IDs, social media handles) that let us match the same member across Congress.gov, the FEC and the two clerks. We use it to join records, never as a source of facts about anyone.
Headlines we link to (not a data source)
Google News
Supplies the headlines shown beside member profiles and bill pages. We do not ingest, rewrite or derive anything from these articles — each headline is a link to the publisher. No number, vote or claim anywhere on ThePolitibase comes from a news outlet.
What we don’t use
We do not pull from Wikipedia, partisan news outlets, opposition research, or commercial political databases. If you don’t see something on ThePolitibase, it’s because it isn’t in the government sources listed above.
Last revised 14 October 2026. This page describes how the site works; the data it describes refreshes on the schedules above, independently of when this text was last edited.