We aim to be the largest database of elected officials and legislative district boundaries in the world.
We update our data on a daily basis, not just after major elections.
Cicero matches to districts based on full address data, leading to the most consistently accurate results.
Our full time team of researchers collects all of our data by hand. We never use scrapers.
In 2006, a nonprofit organization called the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance came to us with a problem: the City of Philadelphia was about to pass a new budget that slashed funding for arts programs.
The Cultural Alliance wanted their members to reach out to their representatives to let them know that this would negatively impact the city. But the issue was that most people didn’t actually know who their state and local representatives were, or how to get in contact with them. We wanted to support that process. So we built the first iteration of Cicero. We gathered the names, contact information, and geospatial district shapes for elected officials in Philadelphia and created an application that would match an address or location to those districts and return elected officials.
Over time we have expanded the database to cover the entire United States, as well as other democracies worldwide. Today, Cicero has supported hundreds of organizations across the world in their advocacy efforts, and our data fuels platforms that are used by thousands more.
Our team are experts in the world of political geography. In the daily work of researching legislative district and election data, we keep on top of news and trends to make sure our data is up to date. We like to write about what we’ve learned or conduct interesting analyses using data we’ve collected in Cicero.