How our data is verified

"Who represents this address?" is only worth paying for if the answer is right. This page is the methodology behind every value the Repped API returns — including the parts that aren't finished, because a coverage claim without its gaps is marketing, not methodology.

Coverage, as of July 2026

The pipeline

1. Authoritative sources first. Federal officials come from Congress.gov; state legislators from the states' own rosters (via Open States and state sources); districts from Census TIGER boundaries. These sources are re-pulled on a schedule, not scraped once.
2. Verbatim verification for local officials. A mayor enters the dataset only if their name and title appear verbatim on the municipality's own official website. Software may locate a candidate value, but code confirms the exact string on the official page before it's kept — anything unconfirmed is routed to human review instead of published.
3. The elected-executive gate. Appointed city managers and administrators are not mayors. Titles are checked against an elected-executive whitelist; appointed staff are excluded rather than mislabeled — even though that lowers our coverage number.
4. Provenance travels with the data. Every field in an API response carries fieldProvenance: the source, a verification status, and the timestamp it was last checked. You never have to take a value on faith — you can see exactly how fresh it is.
5. Scheduled refresh. Datasets are refreshed by automated jobs; officials carry an updatedAt, and stale values are re-checked rather than assumed.

What provenance looks like

"fieldProvenance": {
  "name":  { "source": "congress.gov", "status": "verified", "checkedAt": "2026-06-09T19:29:10Z" },
  "party": { "source": "congress.gov", "status": "verified", "checkedAt": "2026-06-09T19:29:10Z" }
}

Known gaps (the honest section)

• Local coverage is uneven. All 50 states have verified local officials, but depth varies — larger municipalities are covered first, and thousands of small towns are still being verified. Expansion runs weekly, population-ranked.
• Contact details lag identities. An official's name/office/party is verified before their phone or email; some verified officials don't have contact fields yet.
• Some municipalities publish nothing usable. Where a town's website doesn't name its elected leader at all, we leave the record out rather than guess.

Found something wrong? Every record has a report path — email the error and it gets fixed at the source, not patched over.