About GovGlobe

GovGlobe is a ledger of who holds power — every seat, the person in it, and the people who held it before — drawn as a globe you can spin.

The editor

Eleanor Marsh edits GovGlobe. She reads the primary sources — the U.S. Census Bureau's Census of Governments, the Congressional biographical directory, Wikidata's officeholder records, the CIA World Factbook, the Open States legislator files — and keeps the ledger of who holds every seat of power and who held it before. Every number on the site links to where it came from; every correction is logged on the corrections page.

What GovGlobe holds

• 195 countries, each with its form of government and the building where its head of state sits.
• 837 offices with named holders, 33,169 people, 69,995 tenures — the President of the United States back to 1789, every Speaker, every Chief Justice, every governor of every state.
• All 90,837 separate governments in the United States, from the 2022 Census of Governments: 3,031 counties, 19,491 municipalities, 16,214 townships, 12,546 independent school districts and 39,555 special districts.
• 1,567 provenance records, one for every fact that came from outside.

What it does not hold, and says so

There is no central registry of local officeholders in the United States. The Census Bureau counted the country's elected officials once, in 1992, and stopped. GovGlobe knows that every one of the 90,837 local governments exists and, for almost all of them, does not know who runs it. That gap is drawn on the map as fog rather than filled in with a guess.

How pages are made

Editorial pieces are written from GovGlobe's own database, reviewed, edited and signed by the editor before publication. Software prepares drafts and tables; a person decides what is true, what is interesting, and what gets published. Data pages — one for every country, state and county — are generated from the ledger and are not submitted to search engines unless an editor has written them up. The editorial standards say exactly how.

Contact

[email protected]. Corrections are welcome and are credited.

Last updated September 23, 2026.