About Informed Ballot

Our rules

• We never endorse candidates or tell you how to vote.
• Every statement in a summary links to the source it came from. Statements we can’t source are removed automatically.
• We include only the arguments, strengths and criticisms that the sources actually report, and say who makes them. We don’t pad either side to make it look balanced.
• Opinions are attributed to the people who hold them (“the campaign says…”, “the Sierra Club praised…”), not stated as fact. Speculation such as “could be seen as” is removed automatically.
• We paraphrase and link out. Quotes are short (25 words or fewer) and checked against the source.
• When coverage of a subject comes mostly from one side, we say so.

How summaries are made

For each candidate or measure we gather news coverage (from the GDELT news index and, when configured, Tavily), official ballot language and nonpartisan legislative analyses of measures, campaign websites, campaign finance filings (FEC for federal candidates; the Florida Division of Elections for Florida’s statewide candidates), and official records for members of Congress: their service history, the bills they sponsored (Congress.gov) and their roll-call votes (Clerk of the House, U.S. Senate). State legislative records come from Open States. To learn what candidates stand for in their own words, we also use their answers to Vote Smart’s Political Courage Test and to questionnaires, debates and interviews found by a web search; from those pages we keep only the candidate’s own words, copied exactly. A news article counts only if it names the candidate together with the office they are running for, which keeps out other people with the same name. Social media posts are not used.

An AI language model writes a summary using only those sources. Automated checks then remove unsourced claims and speculation, verify quotes, check party labels against the ballot, and hold back any summary that contains voting advice.

The Spanish version of each summary is a machine translation of the English one, made by an AI model with a glossary of election terms. Names and numbers are checked; a passage that doesn’t pass is shown in English. Quotes stay in the language of the source.

AI summaries can still be wrong or miss context. Treat them as a starting point and read the linked sources.

Data limits

• Federal candidates come from FEC filings, which include people who lost primaries or never qualified. In Florida, the state’s official candidate list decides who is on the ballot; elsewhere a candidate is marked “on the ballot” once their campaign files a pre-general report.
• Statewide and local races and measures appear only where an address lookup or a contributed state file provides them.
• State campaign finance is connected only for Florida’s statewide candidates. Lieutenant Governor candidates share the Governor candidate’s campaign account, so they have no separate totals.
• Voting records cover each member’s 100 most recent roll-call votes in their chamber: how many they missed, and the 10 most recent final votes on bills, resolutions and (in the Senate) nominations. Procedural votes count toward attendance but aren’t listed, because they are easy to misread as a stand on the bill.
• Paywalled articles count toward coverage, but only their headlines can be used.