Where you may legally speak.

Every US open-meetings law gives you the right to attend. Thirteen jurisdictions give you the right to say something. This is the whole record — statute, citation, notice period and comment right for all fifty states and the District of Columbia — with the source for each so you can check it yourself.

Statute guarantees public comment 13

Partial / body's discretion 5

No statutory right to speak 33

Scope: each state's open-meetings law as it applies to a local governing body — city council, county board, school board. It is separate from your right to attend, which all 51 grant subject to the usual closed-session exceptions. Nothing here is legal advice; the citation is there so you can read the statute yourself.

Select a state on the map, or find it in the table below.

Jurisdiction	Open meetings law	Citation	Notice	Right to speak

Sources & method

Everything on this site is checkable. If any of it is wrong, the citation is here to prove it with.

Open-meetings law, 50 states + DCStatute name, citation, regular-meeting notice period and public-comment right, compiled from each state's own code and the Reporters Committee Open Government Guide, then corrected against statute text where the two disagreed. Notice periods are for regular meetings of local bodies; 19 jurisdictions set an open standard ("reasonable notice") rather than a number, and are recorded as such rather than guessed. rcfp.org/open-government-guide

Municipal meeting calendars, 125 largest US cities + 10 countiesEach calendar URL was fetched and content-checked, not merely pinged — a Legistar subdomain returns HTTP 200 for any name, so status-only checks produce false positives. Platform breakdown: 60 Legistar, 40 official city sites, 9 PrimeGov, 16 other. webapi.legistar.com

Address → jurisdictionUS Census Bureau Geocoder, Public_AR_Current benchmark. Returns state, county, incorporated place, congressional district and both state legislative districts. Federal, no key, authoritative. geocoding.geo.census.gov

Who holds your seats5 Calls (501(c)(4), non-profit) representative lookup — US House, both Senate seats, governor, attorney general, secretary of state and both state legislative chambers, with office phone numbers. 5calls.org

Map geometryUS Census TIGER state boundaries via us-atlas, Albers USA projection, simplified to 0.7px in screen space. github.com/topojson/us-atlas

Etymologyidiōtēs: Liddell–Scott–Jones, "private person, individual, one in a private station"; the pejorative sense enters English through Latin idiota. ta politiká, polis, politēs: standard. "Love is that which enables choice" is Forrest Landry's formulation. Madison is Federalist 10.

What this cannot tell youNo national dataset of municipal agenda text exists, and no national roster of city council members. Cities beyond the largest 125 get a prefilled search rather than a verified URL. School boards, special districts and water boards are uncovered. Those are the gaps, stated rather than filled.

CorrectionsThe whole site is one file in a public repository. If a citation is wrong, the fix is a pull request. github.com/theguysaccount/politicz

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