Terms of Use

Accuracy

We work to keep official rosters, terms, and district boundaries accurate and verify them against each jurisdiction’s own public records, but government offices change. A name, a term, or a boundary can be out of date before we catch it. Always confirm anything time-sensitive (an election, a filing deadline, a public hearing) with the official source before acting on it.

Your comments and votes

Keep it civil and on-topic. We reserve the right to remove content that’s abusive, harassing, spam, or unrelated to local government, and to suspend accounts that repeatedly post that kind of content. Comments you post are public: they are visible to anyone using Polity, shown under the username you choose, or as “Neighbor” if you haven’t chosen one.

You keep ownership of what you write. By posting, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, display, and distribute it as part of operating Polity, including in the mobile app. That license exists so we can show your comment to other people. It lets us run the service, not sell your words to anyone else. It ends when you delete the comment or your account, except for copies in ordinary backups and anything we must keep by law.

What belongs to whom

The underlying facts of government are nobody’s property. Rosters, bill texts, vote records, meeting agendas, and district boundaries are public records, and we make no claim to them. Go get them from the source, as we do.

Polity itself is a different matter. The software, design, and the particular way this information is selected, checked, combined, and presented are ours, and are protected by copyright and other laws. “Polity” and the Polity logo are our marks; please don’t use them for your own product or in a way that suggests we endorse or are affiliated with something we aren’t.

Things you agree not to do

Use Polity as a person reading it. Don’t scrape it, crawl it outside what robots.txt allows, bulk-download it, or pull from our API directly; don’t copy the database or a substantial part of it; don’t reverse engineer or decompile the app; don’t resell it or use it to build a competing service; and don’t use it to train a model.

If you want this data in bulk for research, journalism, or civic work, write to us rather than scraping. We would usually rather say yes.

Copyright complaints

If you believe something on Polity infringes your copyright, email team@getpolity.com identifying the work, where it appears, and how to reach you, and we’ll review and remove it if warranted.

Not legal or voting advice

Polity is an information and civic-engagement tool, not a substitute for your county clerk, your state’s official election site, or legal counsel.

Changes

We may update these terms as the app changes. Continued use after an update means you accept the current version.

Contact

Questions: team@getpolity.com. See also our Privacy Policy.