Coverage
Who Aletheca can file against, and how sure we are about each layer.
Two numbers, two confidences, and a boundary between them that is worth being pedantic about. Collapsing them into one big figure would be exactly the sort of unverifiable claim this archive exists to check.
Published register — named
1,362
Federal and state bodies you can browse, search and file against by name today: 298 federal offices across 15 cabinet departments, and 1,064 state offices across 56 jurisdictions.
The institutions are real. Contact routes are inferred from domain patterns and are marked unverified until a letter has actually reached them.
Browse the register →Local governments — named
52,105
Every county, incorporated place, township and school district in the country, by its own name — taken from U.S. Census Bureau reference files rather than generated. Each inherits its state’s public-records act, deadline and appeal path.
Browse local governments →- Counties and equivalentsactive county governments3,116
- Incorporated placescities, towns, villages, boroughs19,470
- Towns and townshipsfunctioning MCDs, in 20 states16,186
- School districtsunified, elementary, secondary13,333
Those 52,105 governments contain roughly 224,366 separate records offices — a county has thirteen, a city six, a school district one. Those office names are derived rather than enumerated, which is a distinction worth keeping: every county in the United States has a clerk and a sheriff, so “Clark County Sheriff’s Office” describes a real body. What no file anywhere records is who currently answers its post.
What every county has
The thirteen offices below exist in substantially every county in the United States, and each one holds a different class of record. The county clerk is usually the FOIA router; the sheriff holds the material people most often want; the assessor holds the material nobody thinks to ask for.
Board of County Commissioners / Supervisors
minutes · agendas · ordinances · budgets · contracts · correspondence
County Clerk / Recorder
minutes · elections · property records · licenses · vital records index
County Sheriff's Office
arrest/incident reports · jail roster · body cam · dispatch · IA files
District / County / State's Attorney
charging records · closed case files · correspondence
County Assessor / Appraiser
valuations · parcel maps · tax rolls
County Treasurer / Tax Collector
tax collections · receipts · delinquencies
County Recorder / Register of Deeds
deeds · liens · plats
Board of Elections / Registrar
voter rolls (public portion) · results · campaign finance · poll books
County Health Department
inspection reports · permits · vital stats aggregates · environmental health
County Public Works / Engineer
road projects · permits · bids · inspections
County Planning & Zoning
permits · applications · meeting records · maps
County / District / Circuit Court Clerk
case indices · dockets · judgments (public portions)
County Jail / Detention Center
roster · incident reports · medical grievances aggregates
And in every city
- City / Town Council
- City / Town Clerk
- City Police Department
- City Fire Department
- City Attorney
The layer most requesters forget
Below the city line sit 47,892 school and special districts — fire, water, library, park, utility, sanitation — and in 20 states a township layer of another 15,990 offices. They are separate units of government with their own boards, their own budgets and their own records, and they answer to the same state statute as the county around them.
They are also the least-asked bodies in American government. A fire district’s incident reports, a water district’s testing data and a school board’s contract file are all public records that almost nobody requests, which is exactly why a request there is so often answered in full and on time.
School District
board minutes · budgets · contracts · salary schedules · emails
Fire Protection District
run reports · budgets · meeting minutes
Water / Utility District
usage data · board minutes · contracts
Library District
board minutes · budgets · circulation aggregates
By state
Counties per state are real counts — Texas 254, Georgia 159, Delaware 3 — and each state’s statute governs every office inside it, all the way down to a fire district. That inheritance is why a request to a county clerk has a dependable deadline even where we hold no verified address for the clerk. A dash in the township column means the state has no township layer: town government is a real form in only 20 states, and inventing one for the other 30 would be the same error in the opposite direction.
How this register was built, and what we will not claim
The register is imported from a 95,861-record FOIA dataset assembled for this project. Three things were deliberately left out of what the site publishes, and it is worth saying which.
Local entity names — fixed, and here is how. AlethecaData generates its local names: Nevada’s counties came back as Logan, Hancock and Knox, counties Nevada does not have; Alabama’s “Baker County” carried a FIPS code belonging to South Dakota; Connecticut’s townships arrived as Oldelms and Bay Cedar, sited in a county that does not exist. This site published those layers as counts and refused to name them.
They are now named from the U.S. Census Bureau’s own reference files — the 2020 FIPS county file and the 2023 Gazetteer — retrieved 2026-08-22. The filter that makes it trustworthy is FUNCSTAT = A: only governments that actually function. The Gazetteer’s 32,329 “places” include 12,859 census-designated places, which are statistical areas with no clerk, no council and no records officer; publishing one as a filing target would reproduce the exact problem being fixed, with the government’s own data as the alibi.
What remains withheld is the special-district layer: AlethecaData’s 34,970 fire, water, library and utility districts are still generated (Birchdale Fire Protection District 1, Meadowmaples Public Utility District), and the Census Gazetteer does not publish a special-district file to replace them with. They stay as a count and a typology until a real roster — the Census of Governments — is imported.
Contact endpoints. Phone and fax numbers in the source are literal placeholders and were dropped outright. Email addresses are inferred from domain patterns; they are shown because the pattern is genuinely useful, and marked unverified because they have not been confirmed. Aletheca confirms an endpoint before the first letter goes to it, and records the confirmation as an event.
Performance figures. The dataset ships a scorecard block on every record with zeroes and the statutory number in place of a median. Importing those would have put invented performance data behind a page that says every figure is computed from public filings. Scorecards are therefore published only for the bodies Aletheca has actually filed with — currently a handful, and honestly labelled as such.
None of this is hard to fix, and it is worth saying what the fix is: substitute real place names from the Census gazetteer or GNIS. That one change promotes the whole local layer from coverage to register, and turns “3,224 counties are reachable” into “here is your county clerk, and here is the address that works”.
Machine-readable at /api/v1/coverage · dataset generated 2026-09-03