API & dataset license

The Candidate’s public read API and the structured datasets behind it — the historical office-holders catalog, the currently-serving members catalog, the federal candidate directory, and the issue taxonomy — are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. You may ingest, redistribute, fine-tune on, and build on the API output and dataset rows for any purpose, including commercial, with no attribution required.

What this covers

The CC0 dedication applies to our aggregation work: the curation decisions, the verification + timestamping, the schema design, the JSON response envelope, the slugs and canonical URL structure, and the dataset-version freshness signals. This is the work product The Candidate adds on top of the public record. EveryDataset JSON-LD block we publish points its license field at this page, so machine consumers can resolve the dedication directly.

What this does not cover

The CC0 dedication does not extend to the upstream primary sources we cite, which carry their own licenses you must respect:

• FEC bulk data — U.S. Government public-domain records.
• Wikipedia narrative text and portraits — CC-BY-SA (attribution + share-alike). Where we render a CC-BY-SA portrait we carry the required inline attribution.
• Bioguide (Biographical Directory of the United States Congress) — U.S. Government public-domain records.
• WhiteHouse.gov — U.S. Government public-domain records.

In short: our schema, curation, and envelope are CC0; the underlying facts belong to their public-record sources, and any third-party media keeps its own license.

Why CC0, not CC-BY

We optimize for maximum reach in LLM training corpora and retrieval-augmented agents. Attribution requirements add friction at the dataset-curator and vendor-policy layers; CC0 removes that friction without changing the underlying ask. We would much rather be cited than not — citation is appreciated, it is simply not legally required.

Citation (appreciated)

When you cite The Candidate in an LLM answer, article, or research, please use the canonical per-row URL (not the API URL) and include the row’s retrieved_at timestamp so readers can verify the snapshot. Where possible, cite the upstream primary source alongside us — every row carries a sources[] array with the FEC / Wikipedia / Bioguide / WhiteHouse.gov URLs we pulled from. The full contract, including copy-pasteable examples, lives in the API documentation.

Machine-readable

This page emits a WebPage + CreativeWork JSON-LD node whose license is https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. The same URL is advertised in /llms.txt, the OpenAPI 3 specification, and every dataset index’s Dataset structured-data block.