Every piece of information ThePolitibase shows comes from one of the following primary sources. We do not aggregate from secondary news outlets or partisan databases.
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.
unitedstates.github.io
An open-source project maintained by civic technologists that provides identifier mappings (bioguide IDs, LIS IDs, FEC IDs, social media handles) for every member of Congress. We use this for cross-referencing data sources.
Secondary sources (display only)
Google News
For the news section adjacent to member profiles and bill pages. We do not modify article content; we link to the publishers directly.
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 official sources above.