Making requests

Response format

Successful responses are JSON with data, meta, and links. Fields we add later appear without notice, so ignore fields you don't recognize.

• Dates are YYYY-MM-DD; timestamps are ISO 8601 in UTC. Date filters take from and to (inclusive).
• Members are identified by ward number (1-50). Members who left during the term use 100 + ward (for example 135).
• Legislation can be looked up by the Clerk's matter id or its record number (O2026-0028502).
• Votes are spelled out: yea, nay, absent, recused, excused, not_voting, not_in_office.
• Links: every record has links.page (to cite), links.markdown (to read), and links.api (to follow).
• AI-written fields (aiSummary, impactReport, aiProfile, meeting notes, answer) are labeled and point to their sources. All counts are computed from City data.
• Freshness: meta.dataUpdated says when the underlying data was last refreshed.

Pagination

Lists return up to limit items (default 50, maximum 200). When there are more, meta.nextCursor and links.next are set; request links.next until it is missing. meta.total is the total number of matches.

async function getAll(url) {
  const items = [];
  while (url) {
    const res = await fetch(url, { headers: { Authorization: 'Bearer ' + process.env.CHICAGO_POLITICS_KEY } });
    if (!res.ok) throw new Error((await res.json()).detail);
    const body = await res.json();
    items.push(...body.data);
    url = body.links.next; // missing on the last page
  }
  return items;
}

const nays = await getAll('https://www.chicagopolitics.org/api/v1/members/12/votes?vote=nay&limit=200');

import os
import requests

session = requests.Session()
session.headers["Authorization"] = f"Bearer {os.environ['CHICAGO_POLITICS_KEY']}"

def get_all(url):
    items = []
    while url:
        r = session.get(url)
        r.raise_for_status()
        body = r.json()
        items += body["data"]
        url = body["links"].get("next")  # missing on the last page
    return items

nays = get_all("https://www.chicagopolitics.org/api/v1/members/12/votes?vote=nay&limit=200")

Caching and CORS

Responses send Cache-Control: private, max-age=60, and most data changes at most daily (see data sources), so cache responses on your side. CORS is open (Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *) and the rate-limit headers are exposed to browsers, but keep keys on a server.