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

• {{stat countries}} countries, each with its form of government and the building where its head of state sits.
• {{stat seats}} offices with named holders, {{stat people}} people, {{stat tenures}} tenures — the President of the United States back to 1789, every Speaker, every Chief Justice, every governor of every state.
• All {{stat us_governments}} separate governments in the United States, from the 2022 Census of Governments: {{stat counties}} counties, {{stat municipalities}} municipalities, {{stat townships}} townships, {{stat school_districts}} independent school districts and {{stat special_districts}} special districts.
• {{stat sources}} 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 {{stat us_governments}} 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 16, 2026.