Where the data comes from.
Ballot data starts with official sources: state election offices and Secretaries of State (candidate qualifying lists, certified ballot measures), county election departments (local contests and primary results), the Census Bureau (district boundaries for address lookups), and campaign finance filings. Where official rosters are supplemented, we use established nonpartisan trackers such as Ballotpedia and OpenStates, and we link every candidate profile to its source so you can verify it yourself.
Official first
Ballot measures use the certified ballot language from state election authorities — no paraphrasing, no editorializing. California and Florida measures link directly to official state full-text documents.
Publishing standards
A candidate profile is only indexed and published when it has a verified source link, a substantive biography, and a confirmed place on a current-cycle ballot. Profiles that don't meet the bar stay unpublished rather than published thin.
Nonpartisan by structure
Every candidate in a contest gets the same treatment: same fields, same layout, same sourcing requirements. We list what candidates say their priorities are — we don't rate, endorse, or rank.
How and when data updates.
Candidate slates are updated as primaries and runoffs resolve — fields become nominees within days of results being called, and races decided outright are removed from November ballots. Ballot measure lists are re-checked against state certification pages on a rolling basis; certification is ongoing through late summer. Judicial contests that depend on party conventions (such as New York Supreme Court nominations in late September) appear as clearly-labeled pending entries until rosters are certified.
What we do when data is incomplete.
Election data is uneven. ZIP codes cross district lines, filing periods stagger by state, and local rosters publish late. When we can't be precise, we say so on the page: split-ZIP notices ask for a street address to confirm your district, "coverage updating" entries mark races we know exist but can't yet verify candidates for, and offices with no 2026 election say exactly that rather than disappearing. We would rather show a labeled gap than a guess.
Corrections policy.
If you spot an error — a wrong candidate, a stale roster, a misattributed position — tell us via the contact page. Verified factual errors are corrected on the live site promptly, and materially wrong information is corrected with priority over any other work. For official election information, always confirm with your state or county election office.