Michigan sources & data layers

Every layer in districtry Michigan, and exactly where its data comes from.

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This app is a reader over other people's data. It draws no boundary of its own and names no officeholder it cannot cite, so the useful question about any answer it gives is who published this, and when. That is what this page is for: the publishers the app credits as a whole, then one row per layer naming the source behind that layer specifically.

Not for legal or official use. Boundary and roster data come from public sources that explicitly disclaim legal precision. Always confirm district assignments and officeholders with the relevant government office before relying on them for anything official.

Data last verified: September 11, 2026

Where a source publishes nothing, the app says so rather than guessing — the missing-data panel on the map is the standing list of what nobody publishes yet, and what would close each gap.

This page says where each answer comes from today. What has changed here since the app launched, and when, is its own record: the history page.

Who publishes the data

The upstream publishers this app depends on, across all layers. Per-layer provenance is in the matrix below.

The layer matrix

19 layers — 9 political and legislative, 2 public safety, 3 schools, 5 geography and amenities. Each row names the publisher the boundary comes from, where the names on the card come from, and the ground the layer actually answers on — outside that ground the layer hides itself rather than guessing.

Political & legislative 9 layers

Districts that elect somebody — from your ward to your seat in Congress.

LayerWhat it answersBoundary sourceWho it namesWhere it applies
Court of Appeals Districtmi-court-of-appeals The Court of Appeals district covering the point, how many counties it spans, and how its judges are chosen. It names no judge yet, and says why. NO JUDGE IS NAMED, and that is a measurement. The state court system's own site, www.courts.michigan.gov, publishes `User-agent: *` / `Disallow: /`, so this project does not read it; the one statewide list this project can read is the Michigan Manual 2025-2026, a December 2025 snapshot printed every two years, and a list that old cannot say who sits today. Recorded as gap mi-judge-roster. Michigan — statewide, all 83 counties across 4 districts.
U.S. Houseus-house The U.S. House district covering the point, and the representative holding it. congress-roster.json, rebuilt weekly by CI from the public-domain unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset — including each member's district office and Washington office. Michigan — statewide, all 13 districts.
Michigan Senate Districtmi-senate The Michigan Senate district covering the point, and the senator holding it. mi-senate-members.json, rebuilt weekly by CI — the Open States current-people export (name, party, e-mail, personal site) merged with the Michigan Senate's own all-senators directory, which publishes a Capitol phone, e-mail, office building and contact page for all 38 seats. Open States carries no capitol address or phone for any Michigan legislator (measured 0 of 148), so that contact block comes entirely from the Senate's own directory. Michigan — statewide, all 38 districts.
Circuit Courtmi-circuit-court The circuit court whose judges serve the point — Michigan's trial court for serious criminal cases, larger civil cases and family matters — the counties it covers, and how its judges are chosen. It names no judge yet, and says why. NO JUDGE IS NAMED, for the reason the Court of Appeals row gives: the court system's own site asks automated tools not to read it, and the Michigan Manual's December 2025 list is a dated snapshot. Recorded as gap mi-judge-roster. Michigan — statewide, all 83 counties across 57 circuits.
Michigan House Districtmi-house The Michigan House district covering the point, and the representative holding it. mi-house-members.json, rebuilt weekly by CI from the Open States current-people export (name, party, e-mail, personal site) — all 110 seats. NO CAPITOL CONTACT BLOCK SHIPS FOR THE HOUSE, and that is a measurement rather than an omission: Open States carries no capitol phone or address for any Michigan legislator, and house.mi.gov could not be reached from this project's build environment (TLS: "unable to get local issuer certificate", with the egress proxy's CA bundle explicitly supplied, while senate.michigan.gov answers 200 on identical flags). Whether that is the House site's own incomplete certificate chain or an artifact of this sandbox is unresolved and carries one CI-side probe before it is recorded as anything more — see mi/WATCH.md. Michigan — statewide, all 110 districts.
County Commissioner Districtcounty-commissionerWhat county commissioner district am I in? The county commissioner district covering the point, its county, the population it was apportioned on, and — where the county publishes a district-keyed roster — the commissioner who holds it. EACH COUNTY'S OWN BOARD PAGE, read weekly, and never the boundary layer's own Commissioner column. The state's layer carries a Commissioner and a Party on every one of its 619 polygons, which looks like a free roster and is not one: the item's own description says the values were "derived from the canvased November 2024 election results", so the column lists CERTIFIED ELECTION WINNERS rather than officeholders. That is why it is 100% filled — a district always has a winner — and the fill rate is evidence against maintenance, not for it. Measured 2026-09-03 across 12 counties (123 districts) plus ~40 more in a second pass, 93.5% named the right person and every miss ran the same direction. Re-measured 2026-09-19 across all 48 counties: 234 of 366 seats agree exactly, 132 differ, and 18 of those 132 name a different person — including Wayne District 5, whose named commissioner died on 10 June 2025, four of Muskegon's seven, and St. Clair District 5, where the county names Paul Zeller and the state layer still names Robert Fielitz. The other 114 are the same person written differently: 65 a middle initial or middle name the county omits, 40 a different form of a first name (Dave for David, Bob for Robert) or a suffix or an accent, and 9 a plain typo in the state column (Saginaw's "Sheldon Mattews" for Sheldon Matthews, Jackson's "Tony Blair" for Tony Bair). Both state columns are dropped at the build, the county's page wins every time, and build_mi_commissioner_roster.py prints every disagreement on each run. THE ROSTER ARRIVES IN TRANCHES and is not meant to reach 83: 366 of the 619 districts from 48 counties through tranche 7 (2026-09-19), 61.4% of Michigan's 10,077,331 people, and a district in a county not yet done keeps a card row saying plainly that this app does not know. FOUR COUNTIES ARE SHORT AND FOR THREE DIFFERENT REASONS, each stated in its own words on its own card: Monroe's directory row for District 2 names no commissioner; Ionia's and Clinton's board pages call District 3 and District 4 vacant, Clinton carrying its own Notice of Vacancy for that seat on the same page; and Lenawee District 5's row names Jim Daly where the same county's News Flash of 10 September 2026 announces his death, so two county surfaces disagree and this app names nobody rather than repeating the error it criticises the state column for. Party ships for the seven counties that publish it on the page the names come from. Recorded as gap mi-commissioner-roster; mi/scripts/mi_commissioner_scraper.py's PROBES table records every county tried and what stopped the ten that did not yield. Michigan — statewide, all 83 counties, 619 districts. Every Michigan county elects its commissioners by single-member district (MCL 46.401-46.405); none elects at large, so a polygon is the honest surface everywhere.
City Council Districtcity-ward Which city council or commission district you live in, in the Michigan cities whose council boundaries this app can draw — Detroit, Warren, Grand Rapids, Flint, Rochester Hills, Battle Creek, Jackson, Pontiac, Midland, Muskegon, Holland and Walker — and who represents you in it where the city publishes that. The nine members of Detroit's City Council, from the council's own page at detroitmi.gov — seven by district and two at large, per the 2012 charter Art. 4 §4-101. THE LIVE PAGE REFUSES THIS CLIENT: detroitmi.gov sits behind a Cloudflare managed challenge on both the plain and the client-hints rungs, and this project does not defeat a challenge, so the roster is read from the Internet Archive's copy of that same page — the fleet's terminal fetch rung, in weekly use for Kendall and McHenry since 2026-07 — and the card states which day's copy it read. A snapshot older than 45 days is refused rather than served. NO PER-MEMBER phone or e-mail ships: neither the listing nor a member's own profile page carries a single mailto: or tel: link, measured on both, and that absence is the gap detroit-council-contact. The BODY's own office does ship — City Council Office, 2 Woodward Ave. Suite 1340, (313) 224-3443, published once for the whole Council — rendered for the body under the switchboard rule rather than attached to any member. mvic.sos.state.mi.us is challenged the same way; data.detroitmi.gov is NOT (it answers 200 with a readable robots.txt, and an earlier version of this note said otherwise on the strength of one substring match). Detroit's Legistar is abandoned since 2017 and never carried a district in OfficeRecordTitle even while maintained, where Milwaukee's carries "3rd District" in that same field — test a vendor by content per city, never by its name; its Persons table also flags all 45 records active, five of them system accounts. GRAND RAPIDS: the city's own City Commission pages, which are readable — www.grandrapidsmi.gov answers 200 and its robots.txt permits /government/ — so there is no archive hop here. The city states its own arithmetic ("This legislative body consists of the Mayor and six Commissioners... The residents of each Ward directly elect two commissioners"), and publishes SIX of those seven seats: one Ward 1 commissioner where Wards 2 and 3 each have two. THAT SEAT IS VACANT AND THE CITY SAYS SO OFF THE COMMISSION PAGE — its news post of 2026-04-17 states the vacancy "was created following the resignation of former Commissioner Drew Robbins"; an earlier version of this note said the city stated nothing, having measured only the commission page. No city source found states how the vacancy was resolved, so the card names the vacancy and its cause and stops there. The roster carries `seats` and `seatsPerWard` beside its members and a `vacancies` map KEYED BY WARD, so the card accounts for the seventh seat rather than concealing it or inventing a name — the Alexander County machinery, used here for the first time on a districted body. The cause is data, not prose: it was a ward-agnostic string literal in the card at first, on a row that fires for any ward short of its seats, so a later Ward 2 or 3 vacancy would have rendered Ward 1's predecessor by name on the wrong card. A ward that is short with no verified cause gets the neutral sentence instead, which stays true whatever caused it. Each member's own page supplies their ward, e-mail and direct phone; THE E-MAIL DOMAIN IS grcity.us AND NOT THE WEBSITE'S, so a scraper keyed to the site's own hostname finds none. 616.456.3000 is on every member's page and is the city switchboard, DETECTED as the number common to all of them and hoisted to the body rather than hardcoded. Detroit, Warren, Grand Rapids, Flint, Rochester Hills, Battle Creek, Jackson, Pontiac, Midland, Muskegon, Holland and Walker only. Outside those cities the layer hides itself.
Precinctprecinct The voting precinct covering the point, its county, and how many voters were registered in it for the 2026 cycle. NO OFFICEHOLDER — a precinct elects nobody; it is the unit a ballot is counted in. AND NO POLLING PLACE, which here is a fact about the source rather than a decision: the layer carries no polling field at all, so unlike Iowa's precinct builder there is nothing to decline. The card names the state's own caveat instead — the Bureau collects this from local election officials and says validation was "done by most, but not all" jurisdictions — and points a reader at their clerk. Michigan — statewide, all 3,895 precincts across all 83 counties, as drawn for the 2026 election cycle. Every precinct's county-subdivision key resolves against the Census MCD fabric this instance ships (1,530 of 1,530 distinct keys, measured 2026-09-04 — the same 1,530 on the 2024 map, because the consolidation happened WITHIN municipalities rather than between them), so the precinct and the Township or City card agree on which local government a point sits in. The state's voting-equipment column is deliberately not fetched: it changes on a different clock from the boundary.
Tribal Governmenttribal-government Whether this address is on tribal land, and which nation's government answers for it — Michigan has 24 such areas across 12 nations. The council, from each nation's own published council page, read weekly by scripts/tribal_council_scraper.py and dated on the card. Nine of the twelve nations publish one this project can read; for the other three the card says why it names nobody. The government, its seat and its website come from the Bureau of Indian Affairs' tribal leaders directory (data/bia-tribal-governments.json); the land is joined to the government by this project's own data/tribal-government-join.json, which the Census does not publish and the Bureau does not draw. Michigan — 24 areas across 12 nations. Most points in the state are on no tribal land.

Public safety 2 layers

Who answers a call at this address, and where they answer it from.

LayerWhat it answersBoundary sourceWho it namesWhere it applies
Police Stationpolice-station The three nearest police station BUILDINGS to the point, by straight-line distance, with each one's address. NO OFFICEHOLDER, AND NONE IS MISSING: a police station is a facility, not an elected district. Nobody is elected from one. Michigan — plus the border strip its envelope necessarily includes (608 of the 1,290 are in Michigan; the rest Wisconsin 396, Illinois 265, and a handful in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa and Minnesota). THIS IS A BUILDING, NOT A JURISDICTION: which agency answers a 911 call at a given point is a service-area question, a separate concept this instance has not been researched for, so the card says where the nearest stations are and never who polices you. The intro says so in the reader's own sentence.
Fire & EMS Stationfire-station The three nearest fire and EMS station BUILDINGS to the point, by straight-line distance, with each one's address. NO OFFICEHOLDER, AND NONE IS MISSING: a fire station is a facility, not an elected district. Nobody is elected from one. Michigan — plus the border strip its envelope necessarily includes (1,406 of the 2,838 are in Michigan; the rest Wisconsin 798, Illinois 578, and a handful in Indiana, Iowa, Ohio and Minnesota). A BUILDING, NOT A JURISDICTION: which department or ambulance service is dispatched to a point is a service-area question, a separate concept this instance has not been researched for, so the card says where the nearest stations are and never who responds. The intro says so in the reader's own sentence.

Schools 3 layers

The district, the attendance zone, and the schools nearest the point.

LayerWhat it answersBoundary sourceWho it namesWhere it applies
Intermediate School Districtmi-isd The intermediate school district (ISD, RESA, ESA or ESD) covering the point — the regional school district that serves the local districts inside it — and how its board is chosen. NO BOARD MEMBER IS NAMED. An ISD board is normally elected by one representative from each local school board (MCL 380.614), not by voters; a district whose voters approved it elects its board at the ballot instead (MCL 380.615-617). No statewide roster of ISD board members was found, and the layer carries no people, so the card says how the board is chosen and links the district. Michigan — statewide, every part of the state's land, 56 districts.
School District (Unified)school-district-unified The unified (K-12) school district covering the point. NO OFFICEHOLDER, AND THE CARD NAMES THE DISTRICT ONLY. Michigan school boards are elected (MCL 380.11a et seq.), and no statewide roster of the ~540 boards' members was found in the research pass — recorded as gap mi-school-board-members rather than guessed at. Per-district rosters are later phase work. Michigan — statewide. Together with the 27 elementary districts this tiles the state; the two never overlap.
School District (Elementary)school-district-elementary The elementary school district covering the point, in the 27 places Michigan runs one. NO OFFICEHOLDER — the same gap as the unified layer (mi-school-board-members); the card names the district only. Michigan — the 27 districts that operate no high school of their own. These are GAP-FILLS, not overlays: measured 2026-09-04 at all 27 TIGER interior points, the unified layer returns nothing, and at every unified district's interior point this layer returns nothing. Shipping unified alone would answer 'no school district' to everyone living in one of the 27.

Geography & amenities 5 layers

The boundaries that place an address without electing anyone, plus the nearest public services.

LayerWhat it answersBoundary sourceWho it namesWhere it applies
Countycounty Which county contains the point. None yet — identity only. Michigan's county boards of commissioners are elected by district, and the state publishes every county's commissioner districts (with the commissioner's own name and party) as a single statutory filing under MCL 46.404/46.405; that is this instance's flagship layer and ships in its own change rather than being half-joined here. The card names the county and claims nothing about who runs it. Michigan — statewide, all 83 counties.
Township or Citycounty-subdivision The township covering the point, or the Census placeholder record for the city that stands in place of one — and which of the two it is. NO OFFICEHOLDER, AND THE CARD SAYS SO. Michigan townships elect a supervisor, clerk, treasurer and trustees (MCL 41.61; MCL 42.3 for charter townships), and no statewide roster of them was found in the research pass — recorded as gap mi-township-officers. The card names the office and states plainly that this app does not know who holds it. The 301 city records and the 40 water records are Census bookkeeping constructs, not governments, so no roster claim applies to them at all. Michigan — statewide, all 1,581 records. The charter/general-law distinction is read from TIGER's own NAME suffix rather than a second source, so it cannot go stale against the name printed above it: measured 2026-09-04, the four LSADC values yield exactly four suffixes across 1,581 of 1,581 records.
ZIP Codezip-code The ZIP Code Tabulation Area covering the point — the Census Bureau's areal approximation of the USPS delivery routes sharing a ZIP code, not a postal boundary. NO OFFICEHOLDER, AND NONE IS MISSING: a ZIP code is a mail-routing convenience, not a unit of government, so nobody is elected from one. The card says what the boundary actually is rather than leaving a reader to assume it means more than it does. Michigan — statewide. 1,010 ZCTAs sit east of longitude -87.60; the fetch envelope returns 2,000 because Michigan's bounding box runs west across Lake Michigan to the far end of the Upper Peninsula, and even a clipped box still catches Chicago's 60628 since its south-west corner is in Illinois. NO RECTANGLE ISOLATES MICHIGAN — the same interlocking-states fact metros.json records about the fleet hand-off box — so neighbouring states' ZIPs appear in the map overlay, exactly as they do in Iowa's and Wisconsin's. The CARD is unaffected: it answers from a point query, so a reader always gets the ZCTA they are standing in.
City or Villagemunicipality The incorporated city or village covering the point, if any — and which of the two it is, because in Michigan that changes what else governs the point. NO OFFICEHOLDER, AND THE CARD SAYS SO — no statewide source names Michigan's mayors, village presidents, council members or clerks; the Michigan Municipal League's directory is membership-facing and the state publishes no aggregate. Recorded as gap mi-municipal-officeholders. Per-municipality rosters are later phase work, the route every other instance took. Michigan — statewide, all 533 incorporated places. A CITY is independent of any township; a VILLAGE remains part of one, so a village resident has two general-purpose local governments and each card names the other. Measured 2026-09-04: all 252 villages land inside a township at their TIGER interior point (235 general-law, 17 charter), zero exceptions, and the Census's own place class codes agree — every village is C1, 'does not serve as a county subdivision equivalent'.
Post Officepost-office The three nearest post offices to the point, by straight-line distance, with each one's address. NO OFFICEHOLDER, AND NONE IS MISSING: a post office is a federal facility, not an elected district. The card answers where the nearest ones are, not who runs them. Michigan — plus the border strip its envelope necessarily includes. Of the 1,799 points, 900 are in Michigan and the rest are in Wisconsin (535), Illinois (334) and a handful in Iowa, Ohio, Indiana and Minnesota. THAT IS DELIBERATE, NOT SPILL: nearest-3 is a proximity fact rather than a jurisdictional claim, so for a reader in Menominee the nearest post office really is across the river in Wisconsin, and the card's intro says these are straight-line distances.