Can You Actually Get an Answer Out of This State?
When a machine goes looking for a state government's data, which states answer and which return nothing?
What this ranking does not measure
This is CEFA's own measurement, taken in a single month (September 2026), not a federal statistic — no BLS, Census or BEA series stands behind it, and it cannot be checked against one. It measures whether three specific machine endpoints responded to a probe. It does not measure transparency, government quality, data accuracy, timeliness, licensing, granularity, or whether anything published is worth reading. 'Published address answers nothing' means one URL did not respond at one moment: it is evidence about that URL, not proof a state publishes no data. States routinely publish through agency sites, records requests, PDFs and portals this probe never tried or whose address had moved, and a portal down for maintenance during the probe window scores identically to one that never existed. The score is an average of percentiles, so it locates a state within these 51 only — it is not an absolute scale. A 0 does not mean zero openness; it means bottom-of-field on all three probes, and 13 jurisdictions sit there with indistinguishable inputs. The feeds indicator is especially thin: 27 of 51 states had exactly one reachable feed and all score percentile 0 for it, so a one-feed difference moves a state a long way for a very small real distinction, and the difference between a state with 21 datasets and one with 1 is compressed into the same percentile band as much smaller gaps. Rerunning the probe on a different day would very likely reshuffle the middle of this table. Nothing here explains why a portal answers or fails, and nothing here is advice about what any state should do.
Highest
- 1Vermont88 / 100 — portal live (data.vermont.gov), 10 datasets, 3 feeds
- 2Washington86 / 100 — portal live (data.wa.gov), 7 datasets, 3 feeds
- 3Virginia84 / 100 — portal live (data.virginia.gov), 21 datasets, 2 feeds
- 4Utah79 / 100 — portal live (opendata.gis.utah.gov), 1 dataset, 3 feeds
- 5New Jersey76 / 100 — portal live (data.nj.gov), 5 datasets, 2 feeds
- 6Hawaii75 / 100 — portal live (opendata.hawaii.gov), 3 datasets, 2 feeds
- 7Florida71 / 100 — portal live (geodata.floridagio.gov), 1 dataset, 2 feeds — tied
- 7Pennsylvania71 / 100 — portal live (data.pa.gov), 1 dataset, 2 feeds — tied
- 7Texas71 / 100 — portal live (data.texas.gov), 1 dataset, 2 feeds — tied
- 10North Carolina67 / 100 — portal live (www.nconemap.gov), 0 datasets, 4 feeds — tied with Oregon (67 / 100, data.oregon.gov, 22 datasets, 1 feed)
Lowest
- 39Alaska0 / 100 — published portal address answered nothing, 0 datasets, 1 feed — 13-way tie
- 39Arkansas0 / 100 — published portal address answered nothing, 0 datasets, 1 feed — 13-way tie
- 39Georgia0 / 100 — published portal address answered nothing, 0 datasets, 1 feed — 13-way tie
- 39Idaho0 / 100 — published portal address answered nothing, 0 datasets, 1 feed — 13-way tie
- 39Louisiana0 / 100 — published portal address answered nothing, 0 datasets, 1 feed — 13-way tie
All fifty-one jurisdictions carry this measure; none was excluded.
How it was computed
Ranked on pillars.openness.score, read directly from states.json for all 51 jurisdictions. That score is CEFA's own construction, not a federal series: it is the mean of three indicator percentiles, rounded to the nearest integer. Verified in this session across all 51 jurisdictions — round((portal.percentile + policyData.percentile + feeds.percentile) / 3) equals the published score for every one, 0 mismatches. The three inputs, all sourced in the file to 'CEFA probe, 2026-09' / 'CEFA discovery, 2026-09': (1) portal — does the state's published open-data address answer an API call (28 of 51 answered, 23 returned nothing; answering scores percentile 100, failing scores 0); (2) policyData — count of incentive, permit and finance datasets found (range 0 to 22; 29 of 51 found none); (3) feeds — count of reachable government or agency newsroom feeds (range 1 to 4; 27 of 51 had exactly 1, which scores percentile 0). Ranks are competition ranks (1,2,3...7,7,7,10), so equal scores share a rank; where a shared rank had to be ordered for display, states are listed alphabetically. Two disclosed consequences of that: rank 10 is a two-way tie at 67 between North Carolina and Oregon, and North Carolina occupies the tenth display slot only by alphabet — Oregon is its exact equal on this measure, and reached the same score by the opposite route (22 datasets, the most in the country, but only 1 feed, against North Carolina's 0 datasets and 4 feeds, the most in the country). The bottom is a 13-way tie at 0: Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio and Rhode Island all share rank 39 with identical probe results — dead portal address, 0 datasets, 1 feed. The five shown are the alphabetically first of those 13; nothing in the file separates them, and none is 'worse' than the other eight. Field median score is 51, mean 40.0.