About Chicago Politics
Chicago Politics is an independent, nonpartisan civic project for transparency and accountability. Every vote, committee decision, document, and meeting recording of the Chicago City Council is public record, but it's scattered across City systems. We bring it together so every Chicagoan can see what their alderperson is doing.
Chicago's City Council is the legislative branch of city government. Its 50 alderpersons, one elected from each ward to a four-year term, pass the city budget and ordinances, approve zoning changes and city contracts, and confirm mayoral appointments.
Where the data comes from
- Office of the City Clerk – eLMS
- Chicago Data Portal – Ward Boundaries (2023-)
- Biographies, caucuses, and candidate lists are curated by hand and cite their sources.
Official data was last refreshed October 6, 2026. We keep our own archived copies of every meeting and legislation document, so the record survives even if the City changes it.
How the numbers work
- Votes are full-Council roll calls on legislation the City Clerk flags as key, since May 15, 2023. Committee votes and routine items (such as parking permits) are excluded.
- Attendance is the share of those roll calls where the member voted rather than being recorded absent.
- Divided votes are roll calls with at least one nay. With majority is how often the member voted with the winning side on those.
- Legislation filed counts non-routine matters where the member is the filing (lead) sponsor.
- Waiting / backlog counts non-routine items introduced this term that are still in committee.
How we use AI
- Plain-language summaries of key ordinances are written by an AI model from the official ordinance text only. Every summary is labeled and links to its source document.
- Meeting notes and "in their own words" moments are written by AI from meeting transcripts; speakers are inferred, so every point links to its timestamp in the video.
- All counts, rankings, and patterns (attendance, backlogs, the voting map) are calculated directly from City data, not by AI.
Open data, API, and AI agents
Everything on this site is free to reuse. Please cite Chicago Politics and link to the page. Full details: developers.
- llms.txt: a guide to this site for AI agents and LLMs; llms-full.txt has the key data in one file
- Every page is available as Markdown: add `.md` to the URL (for example /ward/1.md) or send `Accept: text/markdown`
- MCP server (Streamable HTTP) with tools to search documents and legislation and read any page, and an A2A agent
- Public JSON API (OpenAPI 3.1), including semantic search at `/api/search?q=`
- Bulk data files: alderpersons.json, legislation.json, committees.json, meetings.json, insights.json, network.json, predictions.json, wards.geojson
- Feeds: meeting calendar (.ics), RSS per ward at `/api/feeds/ward/{n}.rss`
Contact: hello@chicagopolitics.org