Frequently Asked Questions

Poliscope is a nonpartisan political data platform that connects campaign finance, lobbying disclosures, government contracts, congressional records, and SEC filings into a single searchable interface. All data comes from public government records.

Poliscope is built by Lab 1908 LLC, an independent company with no institutional backing, no corporate sponsors, and no political affiliations.

No. Poliscope has no partisan affiliation, no political donors, and no PAC connections. The platform presents data as reported by government sources without editorial framing.

Poliscope offers a free tier that includes search and browsing of all public data. The developer API includes a free tier for moderate usage, with paid plans available for higher-volume programmatic access.

All data comes from eight primary government sources: FEC (campaign finance), Congress.gov (legislation), USAspending.gov (federal contracts), Senate Office of Public Records (lobbying disclosures), SEC EDGAR (securities filings), GLEIF (corporate ownership), Office of Government Ethics (executive financial disclosures), and House Clerk/Senate (congressional gift and travel filings). We do not scrape, crowdsource, or purchase data from third parties.

Data freshness varies by source. FEC bulk files are updated with each FEC release. Congressional data, lobbying disclosures, and contract data are updated regularly from their respective government sources. There is always some lag between a filing being made and its appearance on the platform.

Entity resolution is probabilistic. We use multiple signals to link records across sources, but some matches may be incorrect and some connections may be missed. Where confidence is lower, records remain unlinked rather than incorrectly merged. If you notice what appears to be an incorrect match, please contact us.

When entity resolution does not produce a high-confidence match, records are left unlinked. This is intentional — we prefer to show less data than to show incorrect connections. Unlinked records can still be found through search.

Poliscope currently focuses on federal data. State-level campaign finance, lobbying, and legislative data from additional sources may be added in the future.

Yes. You are free to use information found on Poliscope in reporting, research, and analysis. We ask that you cite Poliscope as a source and, where possible, verify findings against the original government records.

A simple citation like “Source: Poliscope (poliscope.org)” or “Data from Poliscope, based on [FEC/USAspending/etc.] records” is appropriate. For academic work, include the date of access.

Yes. Poliscope offers a REST API with authenticated access to all platform data. See the Developer documentation for endpoints, authentication, and quick-start guides.

Yes. In addition to the REST API, Poliscope provides an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that allows AI agents and LLM-based tools to query political data programmatically.

Please email hello@poliscope.org with details about what appears incorrect, including the URL of the page and what you believe the correct information should be. We investigate every report.

Email us at hello@poliscope.org for questions, feedback, partnership inquiries, or press requests.