Your answers are yours

What we never collect

• Your name, email, phone number or address.
• Tracking cookies, advertising trackers or advertising identifiers. Fonts are hosted on this site.
• Request logs. Our web server does not keep a record of each visit or of anyone's network address.

Anonymous visit statistics

To know whether the site is useful, we count visits. The counts never identify anyone and never include your answers.

What is counted

• Which pages are read, as daily totals per page. Screens inside the quiz count as pages too, such as "the quiz" or "the health care topic."
• How people found the site: the name of the site that sent them, such as a search engine, or that they typed the address. Only the site's name, never the full link.
• How many browsers visited each day. Your browser keeps today's date so it is counted once per day. No ID is created or sent.
• Four milestones, as totals: finishing the quiz, finishing an everyday topic (which topic), downloading your list of candidates, and finding your districts (which state only).

What is never counted

• Your answers, your picks, the candidates you choose, your address, your district numbers, or anything you type.
• Your network address or your browser's identity. Our server uses the address only for a moment, to skip visits from our own team's network so we don't count ourselves and to slow down abuse. It is never written down.
• Anything that links one visit to another person or to another day.

Matomo, on our own server

We also use Matomo, an open-source analytics tool, on a server we operate at analytics.beswifty.com (not Google Analytics). It runs without cookies, honors Do Not Track, and reports page views, the four milestones above, country and state, device type and referring sites in aggregate. Like any web server, it sees your network address when your browser contacts it, and uses it to estimate country and state. If a blocker stops Matomo, our own counts above still work the same anonymous way.

Your choices

• Turn statistics off with the button above, or on the welcome message. The choice is remembered only in your own browser.
• Browser signals are honored. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, statistics are off automatically.
• In Europe, statistics are off until you allow them. We judge this from your browser's time zone.

How long counts are kept

Our own daily totals are deleted automatically after 400 days.

If you save your answers

• Your browser encrypts your answers before they leave your device. We never see your answers, your username or your password.
• Our server stores only a random-looking record ID, the encrypted data, a fingerprint of a key used to authorize changes, and the time it was last saved.
• Because we never see your password, we cannot reset it. Your recovery code is the way back in.
• Delete your account from the Sign in panel at any time. Deleting removes the saved data from our server.

Anonymous totals of answers

• When you finish the quiz, we add one to running totals like "1,204 people chose this answer," and to totals for each pair of answers, like "380 people chose both of these." That lets us show patterns such as "people who chose X also tend to choose Y." We store only those totals: no list of who answered, no set of anyone's answers, and nothing that links a total to a person.
• We don't show a total until at least 20 people have answered. Switch counting off in the Sign in panel, and your answers are taken back out. This is separate from the visit statistics above.

Candidate matching

Your ballot matches are calculated in your own browser from public candidate records. Your answers are not sent to us to do this.

Finding your districts

If you use "Find my districts", your address passes through our server once to the U.S. Census Bureau's free address locator, which returns a map location, county and census block. Our server looks that census block up in a table of which blocks make up each district, built from each state's official plan, and sends your browser the district numbers. Our server does not store, log or cache the address, the location or the census block. Where a state's block list isn't available, your browser works out your districts from the official district maps instead. Only the district numbers are kept, in your browser. The visit statistics count only that districts were found and in which state. If you enter only a ZIP code, your browser asks our server which county that ZIP is in, using the Census Bureau's public ZIP-to-county table; nothing about the request is stored or logged. If we haven't researched your county or district yet, we add one to a daily count for that area (for example "Brazos County" or "North Carolina Senate District 41") so we know where to research next. That count holds only the area, never your address, ZIP code, location or anything that identifies you. You can skip all of this and pick your districts yourself.

Following your officials

If you sign up to follow your officials, we keep your email address and the district keys from your ballot lookup (for example "tx-hd-98"), never your street address or quiz answers. Nothing is sent until you click the link in the one confirmation email; unconfirmed sign-ups are deleted after 7 days. After that you get election night results and about one email a month on how your officials vote. Every email has a one-click link to stop, which deletes your address immediately. Your address is never shared, sold or used for anything else, and emails are sent without open or click tracking.

Asking us to cover your area

If you ask us to add your county or district (on the ballot page or at Ask us to cover your area), we keep the state, the area's name and the time you asked, so we can see how long requests wait. If you choose to leave an email address, we use it for one thing: a single note when your area is added. We delete the address as soon as that note is sent, and in any case by December 31, 2026. It is never shared, sold, added to a mailing list or used for anything else, and every note has a link to withdraw it sooner. Leaving an email is optional; the request counts the same without one.

Contributions

If you chip in on the Support page, the payment happens on Stripe's checkout page, not on this site. Stripe handles your card and sends us only what a payment record needs: the amount, the date, and the email address and name you give Stripe for your receipt. We use that only for the receipt and our own bookkeeping. It is never shared, sold, added to a mailing list or linked to your quiz answers. Stripe's own privacy policy covers what Stripe keeps.

How we keep it that way

• Every connection is encrypted (HTTPS). The site loads code only from itself, plus the Matomo script from our own analytics server when statistics are on.
• The database account the site uses can only read and write these records and totals, nothing else.
• Changes to the site go through version control and are tested before release.