Open States
Open States is a civic technology project that aggregates and publishes legislative data for all 50 US states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and select municipal governments. It provides a REST API (v3) and a deprecated GraphQL API (v2) for programmatic access to bill text, sponsors, votes, legislators, committee information, and legislative events. Data is also available via bulk downloads. The project is maintained by Plural Policy as open civic infrastructure.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles Open States the way a machine reads it — 21 machine-readable artifacts across 7 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Open States scores 42.0/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 39/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Open States
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Open States. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 7
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Open States GraphQL API (v2 - Deprecated)
Legacy GraphQL API providing access to Open States legislative data. This API has been deprecated in favour of API v3. Existing integrations should migrate to the REST v3 API.
Open States bills API
The bills API from Open States — 3 operation(s) for bills.
Open States committees API
The committees API from Open States — 2 operation(s) for committees.
Open States events API
The events API from Open States — 2 operation(s) for events.
Open States jurisdictions API
The jurisdictions API from Open States — 2 operation(s) for jurisdictions.
Open States Metrics API
The Metrics API from Open States — 1 operation(s) for metrics.
Open States people API
The people API from Open States — 2 operation(s) for people.
Scroll within the panel for all 7 ·
GraphQL 1
Where a provider ships GraphQL, the schema is the contract. We profile it alongside the REST surface so the whole interface is legible in one place.
GraphQL schemas published by this provider.
Open States GraphQL API
The Open States GraphQL API (v2) provides programmatic access to US state legislative data through a flexible GraphQL interface. The API exposes data covering all 50 states, Was...
GRAPHQLPricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Openstates Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Openstates Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Openstates Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
Open States API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 3
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
Examples 3
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Security Posture 1
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Open States — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 1
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 1
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
Other 1
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/openstates · machine-readable index on apis.io