Where the data comes from, how we check it.
Everything on this site comes from a public record.
Committee filings, for the money figures. Two endpoints: Schedule B disbursements from one of the five committees we track to a candidate's principal committee, and Schedule E independent expenditures for or against that candidate. Support and opposition are stored in separate fields and never added together, because money spent to elect someone and money spent to beat them mean opposite things. Contributions earmarked through a third party are out of scope. The figure on a card is therefore a floor across five committees, not a total of everything a campaign has raised, and the card says so wherever it shows a number.
clerk.house.gov · www.senate.gov · api.congress.gov
Votes and sponsorship on 21 tracked measures: 16 floor votes, 2 committee votes and 3 sponsorship records. Each recorded vote is read from the chamber's own roll-call listing and stored with the URL of that listing. Sponsor and cosponsor rosters for the tracked bills come from the Congress.gov API.
Who is on the 2026 ballot, for which office, in which district, under which party. The same pull collects the campaign website and public accounts a candidate publishes, which is how a card avoids saying someone has no website when they have one.
Live market odds. 71 statewide races carry a market slug, 35 Senate and 36 governor. The odds are not stored with the candidate data. The page requests the market by its event slug when you open the race, so the number you see is the market's number at the moment you look, and it links back to the market it came from.
Office-holder identification and contact records. The public congress-legislators directory supplies the official Washington office phone and membership of the committees that handle aid and weapons policy. Wikidata is keyed on the FEC candidate id rather than on a name, which is what stops a match landing on a different person who happens to share one. OpenStates supplies state-legislature records for governor candidates who have served in a state legislature.
Candidate quotes. Every quote links to the page where the words appear.
Primary results: who advanced, who is in a runoff, who is out. The authoritative source is the state's own certified count, and a result carries the date the state certified it. Where a state has not certified yet, the outcome is recorded from published reporting of the count, with that source attached and no certification date on it. Nothing is inferred from a filing, because a defeated candidate stays an active filer until they close their committee.
Published news photography from credited sources.
Every claim, figure and quote on a card links to the page it came from. A vote links to its roll call, a money figure links to the filing, a stated position links to the statement. Each link is stored with the date the page was read, and the card shows that date.
A claim that cannot be linked is not published.
A first pass gathers a candidate's public record one race at a time: their filings, their roll calls where they have held the office, and what they have said in public, each item with the link it came from.
A verification pass then re-reads every quote against the live source before publication. Someone opens the page, finds the words, and confirms they say what we have them saying. A quote whose wording has not been matched to its source does not go on a card. Where a source has moved or gone offline and the wording cannot be confirmed, the quote is labelled unverified or taken off.
Where the two passes disagree, a final review settles it. A record with an unresolved conflict is held back rather than published, and it goes up only after a person has cleared that record by name.
Every finding carries the date it was checked.
We have not looked yet. There are thousands of names on the 2026 ballot and they are worked through in order.
We looked, on the date shown, and found nothing public. If you know of something we missed, send it and we will read it.
A funding figure appears once it has been read from a filing. Unchecked funding says so in words. Unknown is written as unknown, since a zero would be read as a finding.
A vote badge is a recorded roll call, linked to the listing it was read from. Where a candidate did not hold the office at the time, the card says that instead.
Statements made between October 7, 2023 and January 25, 2024 are kept to the research record rather than the card summary. A card is meant to show a considered position, and those first months are a poor guide to one for most people. The statements stay in the research notes on the candidate page, with their sources, where they can be read and weighed. Anything from January 26, 2024 onward is treated as the record and can appear in the summary with its date attached.
October 7, 2023 is where the window opens. Hamas and other armed groups carried out an attack in Israel that day, killing more than 1,200 people, injuring thousands and abducting about 240 more. Those are the figures the International Court of Justice recorded in the order linked below. It was a tragedy. Our team mourned it along with most of the world: innocent lives lost, civilians killed, children among them.
The window closes on January 25, 2024 because of what happened the next day. On January 26, 2024 the International Court of Justice issued its first order in South Africa v. Israel. Citing United Nations figures compiled two days earlier, the court recorded 25,700 Palestinians killed, over 63,000 injured and approximately 1.7 million people internally displaced. By the war's hundredth day, Save the Children had reported more than 10,000 children among the killed, citing the Gaza Ministry of Health. The document is published as the Order of 26 January 2024. From that date the toll was a matter of judicial record, so statements made from January 26, 2024 onward are read as considered positions rather than first reactions.
If United States money were funding Hamas while it killed civilians on an ongoing basis in Israel, this site would be dedicated to voting out the politicians supporting that. Their votes to send money and weapons would be the record we were tracking and their actions would be those we were fighting against. That's not the situation. We confront the world as we find it and join with our brothers and sisters from all creeds, colors, and backgrounds in an attempt to say, this ends now.
Anything on this site can be disputed. The corrections page sets out what gets fixed, how to send it, and what happens after you do.
A candidate or campaign can also reply on the record. A real person reads the reply and checks the factual claims in it the same way the rest of the site is checked. It is then published on the candidate's page word for word, next to the record it answers.