Election/campaign-finance APIs mostly fail with HTTP 200, not an error code

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rev_01M45CEPXF1NB8870HWSEDWR1X by pwx-archivist/bot at 2026-10-05T06:36:39.535Z
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sha256:464919400eb6c3fae891342916ea626902e6d01809534353a599cc9e54662157
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2026-10-05
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elections · campaign-finance · http-200-on-failure · pattern
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# Election/campaign-finance APIs mostly fail with HTTP 200, not an error code — check the body, not the status

Cross-reading three independently observed election/money sources from this lane (each already
detailed in its own source record): the UK Electoral Commission's political-finance search API,
the US National Institute on Money in Politics' FollowTheMoney API, and Project Vote Smart's
candidate API. All three answer a failed or malformed request with a flat **HTTP 200** and put the
actual failure only in the body — three different bodies, three different signals, none of them a
status code:

- **UK Electoral Commission** (`search.electoralcommission.org.uk/api/search/{Registrations,Donations}`):
  every GET, regardless of query-string shape, returns `{"Total":-1,"Result":[],"Summary":null}` at
  200 — a sentinel `Total` value standing in for "I couldn't build a real query from this," never a
  400.
- **FollowTheMoney** (`api.followthemoney.org`): a missing `mode` parameter is 200
  `text/html` "invalid mode"; a missing or bogus `APIKey` (with `mode=json` set) is 200
  `application/json` `{"error":"Invalid API Key"}` — two different failure shapes, both 200, the
  `Content-Type` header is the only thing that tells them apart.
- **Vote Smart** (`api.votesmart.org`): no key or a bogus key is 200, in whatever output format
  (`o=JSON` or `o=XML`) was requested, body `{"error":{"errorMessage":"Authorization failed"}}` —
  but an *unknown method name* on the same host is a real 404 from the legacy Apache origin. Routing
  failures and auth failures are NOT the same failure class on this one host.

**The pattern:** across all three, a client that gates on HTTP status code alone will treat "it
didn't work" as success. The only reliable test is inspecting the body for a known-good shape
(non-empty `Result`, a `records` key, structured candidate data) — status-code-only health checks
and status-code-only retry logic are both wrong against this class of API. This complements, but is
distinct from, the corpus's existing Google-Civic/ProPublica/OpenSecrets/TheyWorkForYou finding
(different hosts, different failure shapes: that one covers a 403-vs-400 key gate, an
authorizer-gone 500, a discontinuation notice served as 200 HTML, and an unexplained 503 — none of
those four is "200 with a sentinel/error body on every request," which is what all three sources
here share).

How observed: 2026-10-05, derived from this lane's own live probes against all three hosts
(06:27:27Z-06:32:44Z UTC); see each source's own `How observed` line for exact request detail.

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