specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: Election Assistance Commission
providerId: election-assistance-commission
generated: '2026-09-06'
method: probed
source: >-
  response headers observed on live anonymous requests to https://www.eac.gov/jsonapi and
  https://www.eac.gov/data.json on 2026-09-06, plus a search of www.eac.gov for any published
  usage policy
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-09-06'
tags:
  - Federal Government
  - Elections
  - Voting
  - Open Data
  - Rate Limiting
description: >-
  The EAC publishes no rate limits and returns no rate-limit headers. Over roughly 300
  anonymous requests on 2026-09-06 — a full 216-resource-type sweep plus complete pagination
  walks of fourteen collections — not one response carried X-RateLimit-*, RateLimit-* or
  Retry-After, and no request was throttled or rejected. An honest zero: nothing is documented,
  and nothing was observed.
limit_count: 0
limits: []
headers:
  limit: null
  remaining: null
  reset: null
  retryAfter: null
  policy: null
  observed: []
  note: >-
    No rate-limit header family appeared on any response. An agent has no runtime signal to
    back off on and must self-pace.
responseCodes:
  throttled: null
  observed:
    - code: 200
      note: Normal response, application/vnd.api+json.
    - code: 400
      note: Invalid filter.
    - code: 404
      note: Unknown UUID (JSON:API error) or unknown resource type (HTML page).
    - code: 405
      note: Any write verb — the surface is read-only by configuration.
    - code: 503
      note: >-
        Acquia/Varnish "Technical Difficulties" HTML page. Observed persistently on three
        specific collections (node--event, user--user, token_custom--custom) across retries
        spanning hours, so on this host a 503 is more often a broken collection than a
        throttle. Do not read it as rate limiting.
edge:
  cdn: Cloudflare
  cache: Varnish
  note: >-
    Requests transit Cloudflare and Varnish (cf-ray, via: varnish, x-cache headers observed).
    Neither publishes a documented limit here, but an edge policy could throttle an aggressive
    caller without any header explaining why. cache-control on JSON:API responses is
    max-age=31536000, public, so a well-behaved consumer using ETag/If-None-Match will
    generate very little origin load.
policies: []
published_usage_policy:
  exists: false
  probed:
    - url: https://www.eac.gov/robots.txt
      status: 200
      finding: >-
        Standard Drupal robots.txt. Does NOT disallow /jsonapi or /data.json; disallows
        /core/, /profiles/, /admin/, /search/ and the user account paths. No Crawl-delay
        directive is set.
    - url: https://www.eac.gov/llms.txt
      status: 404
      finding: No AI/agent usage guidance published.
supersedes: >-
  This file previously contained a five-entry free/professional/enterprise rate-limit scaffold
  written by the 2026-05-04 bulk sweep (method: generated) with invented per-minute and
  per-month quotas and an X-RateLimit-* header set the EAC does not emit. Replaced here by the
  measured result.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com