The office is canonical
People rotate. The public institution, jurisdiction, seat, and history stay attached to one permanent office record.
Trust is a system
Neutrality you can inspect.
Election.org does not ask you to trust a tone of voice. It publishes the rules that decide what enters the record, what stays out, and how an error gets corrected.
No provenance, no render
Every record must carry a source URL, license or public-use basis, verification date, and confidence level.
Party is never a visual ranking
Party labels use the same neutral treatment. Brand red never means Republican; brand navy never means Democratic.
No guessed holder
A vacancy or missing local roster produces an honest shell. The last known person is never silently carried forward.
Public facts stay ungated
Who represents you, office history, sources, money records, and corrections never require an email or account.
Participation cannot alter the record
Claiming a profile, signing a standard, donating, or paying for tools cannot buy a score, ranking, endorsement, or hidden fact.
Unlike money categories never collapse
Candidate receipts, direct committee contributions, coordinated party expenditures, and independent support or opposition remain separate. Support and opposition reproduce the filer-reported FEC position, not an Election.org inference.
Amendments replace prior versions
Stable committee transaction IDs retain the newest file number. Independent-expenditure rows from superseded filings are removed through the reported previous-filing chain so corrected filings are not silently double-counted.
Employer is context, never attribution
An employer aggregate means individuals typed the same employer on their filings. It never means the organization donated, directed, reimbursed, or endorsed those contributions.
Individual identities stay out
Employer/recipient aggregates require at least five distinct reported contributors. Election.org does not ship names or addresses from the individual-contribution store and links to the FEC restrictions on commercial or solicitation use.
Recorded votes are not inferred positions
House and Senate member labels are reproduced from official roll calls. Voice votes, committee votes, speeches, absences, and motives are not inferred; no vote becomes an Election.org ideology, attendance, or effectiveness score.
Election calendars are schedules, not ballot claims
FEC-published congressional dates are shown as tentative schedules. State authorities administer elections and determine ballot access, and a candidate filing does not prove ballot qualification.
Local coverage advances adapter by adapter
A local name enters only through a jurisdiction-specific official roster adapter with expected row counts, required fields, provenance, and source-drift failure checks. Every other verified jurisdiction remains a shell; no national completion percentage is invented.
The API cannot outrun the record
Web pages and public endpoints share stable identifiers, sources, coverage labels, and honest omissions. Address responses are private and never cached; voter research notes stay on the voter’s device. A federal filing remains a filing record and is never presented as proof of ballot qualification.
Administration profiles are not election notices
EAC/NCSL policy profiles may summarize registration, early-voting, absentee, mail-ballot, and primary rules. Election-specific deadlines and eligibility must be confirmed with the responsible government office. A zero- or one-record FEC filing field is a research signal, never an uncontested-race label.
Candidate fields keep their speaker
A government biography, campaign-reported endorsement, candidate statement, and Election.org action summary remain distinct. Every populated comparison cell retains a source; a missing position or questionnaire is visible and never converted into a judgment, refusal, score, or inferred belief.
A blank questionnaire is not a refusal
Every connected candidate receives the same eight-question page. Election.org records invitation status separately from response status and never claims outreach that did not occur. Candidate-provided answers publish only after an identity challenge through an independently located official channel; verification identifies the speaker but does not turn an answer into a government fact or Election.org endorsement.
Ballot explanations preserve the decision
A ballot-measure record keeps the official summary, fiscal effect, Yes meaning, No meaning, route to the ballot, submitted supporters and opponents, and source text distinct. A judicial-retention record says plainly that Yes means retain and No means do not retain. Election.org never turns an absent rating, result, opinion, discipline record, or local ballot layer into a zero or finding.
A vendor name is not an accusation
Operating-expenditure pages reproduce organization payee names reported on FEC Schedule B records after conservative normalization. Individual payees remain unpublished. A matching name does not establish legal identity, ownership, services delivered, ideology, influence, or wrongdoing; memo-code X rows stay outside itemization totals.
A source directory is not a transaction dataset
State campaign-finance pages identify the government agencies listed by the FEC as disclosure offices. Until a jurisdiction-specific adapter has source contracts, entity resolution, amendment logic, and fail-closed validation, Election.org publishes no state contribution, expenditure, donor, or vendor totals for that jurisdiction.
A certified result is not a projection
Historical result pages reproduce the FEC biennial publication compiled from state election offices. Primary, general, runoff, fusion-party, and ranked-choice fields remain distinct; blank stays blank. The FEC winner indicator is preserved, while Election.org-calculated margins or a highest-total fallback are explicitly labeled and never represented as a separate certified field or election-night call.
A government entity is not an elected-office roster
The Census Government Units Listing establishes a public entity or related system, its category, identifiers, contact fields, and functioning or dormant status. Address lookup connects functioning counties, municipalities, and townships only when the Geocoder GEOID exactly matches the Listing's FIPS identifiers; ZIP-center matches remain approximate. An entity match does not establish that a board is elected, identify officeholders or candidates, define election methods or terms, or provide exact service boundaries. Those fields remain absent until a source-specific official adapter verifies them.
A public-official roster is not an election-method claim
The 2026 California CalRoster is supplied by counties and incorporated cities or towns to the Secretary of State. Election.org connects each jurisdiction to a permanent Census government ID and reproduces source-reported roles and names, but does not infer elected or appointed status for any individual role. Vacancies and missing names remain explicit; visibly truncated PDF text is flagged as source-incomplete and excluded from address-summary cards instead of being repaired by guesswork.
A judicial directory is not a retention ballot or scorecard
A court roster establishes only the name, court membership, role, and source-reported service note it publishes. Election.org links a justice to a retention election only when a separate official voter-guide record names that justice. Directory presence never becomes an ideology, notable-opinion, reversal, rating, discipline, campaign-finance, or misconduct claim; an incomplete source year stays visibly incomplete.
A contest shell is not a certified ballot
A current federal contest groups identity-complete FEC filing records by cycle, office, state, and district and connects them to a separately sourced election calendar. It does not establish ballot qualification, final candidate lists, ballot order, primary eligibility, withdrawal status after the source snapshot, or a complete sample ballot. Those claims remain absent until the responsible election authority publishes and Election.org ingests them.
A source defect is part of the public record
A government-hosted draft, duplicated section, mismatched analysis, or incomplete proof is never silently repaired or promoted to final. Election.org may publish internally consistent first-page ballot fields while quarantining unrelated interior material, labeling the document status, fingerprinting the source file, and waiting for a matching official analysis before adding current-law, fiscal, or argument summaries.
A candidacy guide is not an eligibility finding
A cycle-specific official guide may establish published offices, forms, filing windows, fees, signature minimums, signature geography, qualifications, terms, and dated compensation. It does not establish any person's residence, voter status, credentials, disqualifications, valid signatures, completed filings, or ballot access. A past deadline stays visibly closed, and future cycles require a new source adapter rather than copied dates.
A campaign website keeps the campaign as speaker
Campaign homepage summaries, biography pages, issue pages, endorsements, and images may make a candidate profile more useful, but they remain candidate-provided material. Election.org fingerprints each current site, labels independently discovered domains, attributes every image to its source page, and never lets campaign material overwrite certified names, offices, ballot order, occupational designations, results, or government portraits. Missing campaign sections stay missing instead of becoming inferred beliefs or negative findings.
A topic label is an index, not an interpretation
Election.org may group exact campaign-published headings under a neutral topic so two candidates can be compared in equal rows. The original heading, campaign speaker, source page, retrieval date, and fingerprint remain attached. A topic match never becomes an ideology, support or opposition label, priority ranking, truth finding, or claim that every public statement has been found. If either campaign publishes a topic, the other candidate receives an explicit sourced statement or an honest empty cell.
An endorsement page is an inventory, not a score
Election.org may index the names, titles, source order, and category labels a campaign publishes on its endorsement page. The campaign remains the speaker. Election.org does not independently confirm consent, current titles, organizational authority, or continued support. Because campaigns publish different scopes and groupings, record counts never become measures of momentum, quality, importance, or support.
A standardized CV is a source map, not credential verification
Every candidate receives the same background fields. A City Clerk-certified occupational designation remains an official ballot field but not independent credential verification. Every other populated value is an exact campaign biography excerpt with the campaign as speaker. An empty field records only that no matching claim was located in the configured source; it never proves the candidate lacks education, work, military service, public office, board experience, campaign history, or an election record.
An archive capture is an observed-by date, not publication time
A Wayback capture can establish that an exact current campaign excerpt appeared in a captured page by the archive timestamp. It does not establish when the campaign first wrote or published the statement. Election.org preserves archived and live observations, source fingerprints, and fetch errors but never generates a flip-flop, reversal, consistency, motive, or what-changed verdict from matching excerpts alone.
Media source classes never collapse
A sourced debate event, full recording, clip, news report, candidate-provided video, and City Clerk-published transcript are different records. Election.org never labels a candidate statement as a debate, substitutes commentary for a missing full recording, or claims a transcript exists when none was located. Topic timestamps are neutral navigation; government republication verifies a link, not the truth of candidate claims.
A promise status is an action description, not a political grade
Election.org connects a precise, dated campaign commitment to dated public actions or official measures and assigns only the narrowest status those records support. Action completed, official reporting says a threshold was exceeded, target not reached as of a source date, and no matching action located never become kept, broken, truthful, effective, good-faith, causal, or motive findings. Officeholder-reported performance data remains labeled as self-reporting and is not presented as an independent audit.
A disclosure index is not the document inside it
The House Clerk annual index may establish a filer name, district, filing code, date field, document ID, and direct PDF. Only official code P is labeled a Periodic Transaction Report. The index itself does not expose the transaction rows inside a PTR, so filing-level and row-level evidence remain separate. Exact duplicate source rows are deduplicated, while blank dates and future-dated source anomalies stay visible.
A PTR row passes as evidence or stays out
Election.org extracts a digital House PTR only when every transaction row matches verified geometric columns and passes date, asset-code, transaction-code, and amount validation. One failing row excludes the whole filing. Image-only scans remain linked with a visible exclusion reason and produce no guessed OCR rows. Source text, codes, exact values or ranges, amendment status, notes, page number, and PDF fingerprint stay attached. Deleted rows remain filing history but leave active totals. A reported transaction never becomes evidence of wrongdoing, material nonpublic information, motive, profit, loss, current holdings, net worth, conflict, or investment advice.
A person graph merges identifiers, never similar names
Federal terms connect only through the person ID already supplied by the CC0 term corpus; state roles connect only through the Open States UUID; campaign records and certified federal results connect only through exact FEC candidate IDs; recorded votes connect only through Bioguide IDs. A House financial-disclosure index has no durable person ID, so any first-name, last-name, state, and district match remains separately labeled and never upgrades into an identifier join. The federal timeline begins with terms starting in 1923, and the state layer is a current-role snapshot—not a complete career history.
A political communication filing is not the ad creative
An FEC independent-expenditure row may report advertising, mail, calls, canvassing, production, or another expressly advocated communication or activity. Election.org reproduces the filer-supplied sponsor, candidate, position code, amount, dates, purpose, payee, and filing identity without inventing a platform, audience, target, message, media asset, or proof anyone saw it. Support and opposition are filer-reported codes. The filing does not prove candidate coordination or approval, persuasion, effectiveness, motive, or wrongdoing.
Dispute is part of the method
Every fact must be correctable.
Corrections should identify the office record, disputed field, replacement value, and a license-clean primary or official source. The prior value remains auditable in the refresh history.
Source priority
The shortest trustworthy chain wins.
- Official government dataFEC, Census, Congress, state and local election authorities.
- Public-domain normalized corporaOnly where the license and update process are explicit.
- Candidate-provided contentClearly labeled, attributed, and never rewritten as fact.
- NothingWhen no acceptable source exists, the honest empty state is the answer.