Good news if you were one of the users waiting on our Congress API to support the newly drawn congressional districts! As of today it is possible to pass the districts=2012 flag to the Congress API’s districts.getDistrictFromLatLong method to instruct the API to return the district in effect for the 2012 elections.

As you may recall, the data wasn’t previously available in a uniform format but thanks to a recent data release from Census.gov we were able to get this data loaded, with days to spare until the election.

The default will remain to return the districts in effect for purposes of representation until the swearing in of the 113th Congress in January 2013 at which point the temporary districts=2012 flag will be retired (but it will be safe to continue to pass the parameter indefinitely).

This change does not yet impact other Sunlight API methods. The Open States district methods and the ZIP code related methods will be updated as that data is available, as described in our last update.)