VoteAmerica builds free, publicly available tools to help Americans navigate the complexity of voting.

"We never worry about you guys. You can quote me on that. We trust you guys to give us accurate data."

Who They Are

VoteAmerica is a non-partisan non-profit that provides free, publicly-available tools to help Americans navigate Election Day: from registering to vote, to finding a polling place, to requesting an absentee ballot, and more.

Their work reaches millions of people every election cycle and requires getting the details right. Voting in the United States is tied to a person’s physical address. Congressional districts, state legislative districts, county-level election offices, and polling places are all determined by where a person lives.

Reliable geocoding and data enrichment are essential to everything VoteAmerica does.

VoteAmerica has been a Geocodio customer for over ten years, when its predecessor organization began building voter registration tools. “We geocode as soon as someone enters an address,” says Debra Cleaver, Founder and CEO of VoteAmerica. “The first thing we have to do is standardize it.”

The Challenge

Before switching to Geocodio, VoteAmerica relied on a solution that normalized addresses to USPS mailing standards. Postal validation is helpful for shipping packages, but creates problems when trying to help people vote.

Voter registration is tied to a physical address, not a mailing address. In many parts of the US, those aren’t the same thing. Take Pacific City, Oregon: an unincorporated coastal town located in the famous dairy region of Tillamook County. Many people are familiar with the area’s cheese and ice cream, yet what’s less known is that the Postal Service doesn’t deliver to homes there. Everyone picks up their mail at a P.O. box. Yet every resident still has a street address, and that’s the address they register to vote with.

“We had entire towns in America where we couldn’t normalize the address,” Debra says. “Voting is about a physical address. It is not about your mailing address. You cannot register to vote with a P.O. box.”

When VoteAmerica ran voters’ physical addresses through their previous solution, it rejected them as invalid because they weren’t mailable addresses. All of the registered voters in a small town like Pacific City were being told they weren’t registered, even when they were.

“One thing we never want to do is accidentally disenfranchise a voter,” Debra says.

Beyond address normalization, VoteAmerica also needed reliable congressional and state legislative district data. The organization targets its voter mobilization campaigns at the congressional district level, as states are too large a unit for precise targeting. Many other providers only update their district boundary data with each Census, but off-cycle redistricting means boundaries can change at any time. Keeping up with redistricting meant sourcing shapefiles from each state and running labor-intensive GIS projects.

Reliability was just as important. VoteAmerica’s voter-facing tools need to handle enormous traffic spikes on Election Day, when millions of Americans are looking up their polling place at once. Other providers imposed query limits that throttled access at exactly the wrong moment. “They were cutting people off after a certain number of queries, which is a real issue when it’s Election Day and you have the entire country trying to find their polling place,” Debra says.

The Solution

VoteAmerica needed a geocoding provider that could standardize physical addresses, keep up with redistricting, and stay standing on Election Day. They switched to Geocodio.

Today, when a voter enters their address on VoteAmerica’s site, the standardized address is sent to Geocodio’s API for geocoding and data enrichment. In a single API call, VoteAmerica retrieves coordinates, county information, and congressional and state legislative district data. To understand whether their tools are reaching voters across demographic and socioeconomic groups, they also add Census data fields including demographics, income, and housing data.

That data powers several areas of VoteAmerica’s work:

Voter-facing tools

Coordinates from Geocodio enable VoteAmerica’s polling place lookup, which displays maps and driving directions. County data determines which local election office voters should contact for absentee ballot requests.

Congressional district data fuels election reminders targeted to competitive races. The election lookup tool uses coordinates to show voters which specific races appear on their ballot. Without congressional districts, the tool can only show state-level elections.

Campaign targeting

VoteAmerica uses a weighted scoring system to identify voters who can participate in the greatest number of competitive races up and down the ballot. They then target outreach at those voters to help them find early voting locations and their Election Day polling place. Congressional districts are the unit of measurement for this targeting.

“We’re basically marketing Election Day,” Debra says, “and running a marketing campaign towards a whole state is just too broad.”

Internal analytics

Census data appends help VoteAmerica understand who’s using their tools without asking voters for sensitive personal information.

Emily Behlmann, VoteAmerica’s Director of Engineering, describes the technical integration as simple. When the team later decided they wanted Census data appends as well, the process was seamless. “It was very easy to start adding Census data. It’s as simple as adding another parameter to the API request.”

Keeping Up With Redistricting

Some data providers source their congressional district data from the Census Bureau, which only updates every two years. Given the recent flurry of redistricting (six states in the fall of 2025 alone), relying on the Census Bureau for district boundaries means voters might be placed in the wrong districts.

Geocodio independently tracks redistricting and updates its API as new maps are passed. (You can see the current status of every state on Geocodio’s public redistricting tracker.) “We do all of our targeting by congressional district, so when the district changes, our targeting changes,” Debra says. “I’m not sure who else would be as up to date as Geocodio, because it’s a lot of work. It’s so helpful to have that handled for us.”

VoteAmerica stores congressional district data at the point when a voter uses their tools, then refreshes that data when districts change. “It’s been a crazy, crazy time for redistricting,” Emily says. “It’s important that we make sure that the information is accurate, as states are redistricting last minute.”

The Results

Using Geocodio has expanded VoteAmerica’s capabilities while reducing internal maintenance burdens.

Trustworthy in a high-stakes, high-volume environment. VoteAmerica processes millions of voter records and addresses annually through Geocodio, including tens of thousands of mangled addresses that need normalization. The combination of accurate physical address recognition, reliable congressional and state legislative district matching, and affordable pricing at scale has made Geocodio a core part of the VoteAmerica team’s toolbox for over a decade.

Reliable congressional and state legislative district data during unpredictable times. U.S. elections have no single source of truth for data. States provide information in PDFs, sometimes even as photographs of PDFs. VoteAmerica routinely corrects errors in federal and state government election data. In that environment, having a trusted data provider matters. “We are in a space where it’s almost impossible to get accurate data, and we never worry about Geocodio,” Debra says. “You can quote me on that. We trust you guys to give us accurate data.”

Expanded targeting capabilities. Congressional district-level targeting is core to VoteAmerica's work. "Geocodio is the easiest, most reliable way for us to get this data," Debra says.

A straightforward developer experience. Emily describes the API as easy to learn, easy to extend, and reliable in production. The team has never encountered batches of bad data. Adding new data appends requires minimal engineering effort. Geocodio’s pricing model gives VoteAmerica the flexibility to temporarily scale up for large address standardization and data enrichment backfill operations without worrying about cost.

A tool the team trusts and recommends. VoteAmerica actively recommends Geocodio to other organizations. When asked what she’d say about Geocodio in closing, VoteAmerica Founder Debra Cleaver’s answer was simple: “It just works. That’s probably the best thing you can say about software.”