specification: API Commons ChangeLog
specificationVersion: '0.1'
provider: Democracy Works
providerId: democracy-works
generated: '2026-09-07'
method: searched
source: >-
  Probes of https://data.democracy.works/developer-updates and
  https://www.democracy.works/developer-updates, the newsroom at
  https://www.democracy.works/news, and both live API references
description: >-
  Democracy Works has NO live API changelog. It used to publish one and the page is gone;
  what remains is an organizational newsroom and a Google Group. This file records that
  regression with the probes that establish it, so the absence is legible rather than
  looking unchecked.
scheme: none
current_version: '2.0'
changelog_url: null
availability: retired
retired_changelog:
  url: https://data.democracy.works/developer-updates
  status: 200
  result: dead
  probed: '2026-09-07'
  note: >-
    Returns HTTP 200 but redirects to https://www.democracy.works/ and serves the homepage
    (body md5 6c490738ce9cf569b59f7ebded4ef930, identical to a control probe of a nonsense
    path). Indexed by search engines as "Developer Updates — Democracy Works Election Data",
    so it existed; the whole data.democracy.works portal has been folded into the marketing
    site and the developer-facing pages did not survive the move.
alternate_probe:
  url: https://www.democracy.works/developer-updates
  status: 404
  probed: '2026-09-07'
  note: The page was not re-homed on the marketing domain either.
stated_change_channel:
  url: https://groups.google.com/a/democracy.works/g/democracy-works-data
  status: 200
  note: >-
    Both the v2 contract and the v1 contract tell developers to "join the community of
    developers in our Google Group for updates about our data and elections." That group is
    the provider's declared change channel — a mailing list, not a dated machine-readable
    changelog, and not readable without a Google account.
entries:
- version: '2.0'
  date: '2024-01-09'
  type: major
  breaking: true
  source: https://www.democracy.works/news/democracy-works-releases-new-version-of-elections-api
  highlights:
  - New /v2 base path, replacing the unversioned v1 surface.
  - 'Auth header changed: v1 ''Authorization: apikey <key>'' became v2 ''X-API-KEY: <key>''.'
  - Extended dataset covering the full range of Democracy Works election and voting data.
  - Youth pre-registration instructions added.
  - Address-level search for a voter's upcoming elections.
  note: >-
    Dated from the provider's own announcement post. Democracy Works published no migration
    guide and no sunset date for v1, which is still live — see
    lifecycle/democracy-works-lifecycle.yml.
- version: '2.0'
  date: null
  type: additive
  breaking: false
  source: https://developers.democracy.works/api/v2
  highlights:
  - >-
    Six operations exist in the live contract that were absent from the copy this catalog
    harvested previously — getBallotMeasure, getCandidate, getContest, getEndorsement,
    getEndorsementBulk and getVotingLocations — growing the surface from 5 to 11 operations
    without an info.version bump.
  note: >-
    UNDATED BY THE PROVIDER. Observed by diffing the live spec against the copy in
    openapi/_original/openapi-spec.yml (harvested 2026-05-03). Because info.version stayed
    at "2.0" and no changelog exists, a consumer has no way to detect this growth except by
    re-fetching the spec. Recorded here as an observation with its evidence, not as a
    provider-published release note.
gaps:
- No dated changelog, release notes page, or RSS/Atom feed for the API.
- No version bump accompanies additive changes to the contract.
- The one former changelog URL now soft-404s and is still linked from search results.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com