Privacy
This site asks where you live in order to tell you which districts you vote in. That is a sensitive thing to ask for, so here is exactly what happens to it.
Your address
Your address is never stored, never logged, and never put in a web address. It is sent once, used to look up your districts, and discarded.
Three specific things make that true rather than merely promised, and each is enforced by a test that fails the build:
- The lookup is a POST, never a GET. An address in a web address ends up in server logs, in your browser history, and in the Referer header sent to every site you click through to afterwards. So it is never in the URL at all.
- Nothing in the lookup code writes to a log. The test greps the code for logging in the address path and fails if any exists, because by the time you could observe the leak the address has already leaked.
- Nothing writes your address to the database. Results are cached under a one-way hash so a whole building shares one entry; the address itself is not part of the key and is not recoverable from it.
The page carrying your result is sent with Cache-Control: no-store, so it is not
kept by your browser or by anything between you and this site.
What the lookup talks to
To find your districts, the lookup sends the address once to the United States Census Bureau's public geocoder and to the Census TIGERweb district service. Those are government services and their own terms apply to them. Nothing else receives it.
Analytics
This site uses Google Analytics (measurement ID G-HLTGPXLSVR) to count how many
people visit and which pages they read. It sets cookies in your browser and sends Google your
internet address, the page you are on and basic details about your device.
It is configured with address anonymisation on, and with Google's advertising features, remarketing and ad-personalisation signals switched off. Nobody should be building an advertising profile out of someone looking up how their representative voted on cannabis.
Analytics never receives what you typed into the lookup. The lookup is a form submission, not a page address, so the thing Google records is that somebody loaded this site — not where they live. See the section above for why that is structural rather than a promise.
If you would rather not be counted, any tracker blocker will stop it, and the rest of the site works exactly the same without it. Nothing here waits on analytics to load.
Comments and ratings
Where this site takes anything you write, it takes no account, no email address and no name you have to prove. What it keeps is a shortened one-way hash of your internet address, used only to stop one person voting a thousand times. It cannot be turned back into your address.
No advertising
There is no advertising on this site and no ad code anywhere in it, which a test asserts on every build. Cannabis content is restricted under the major ad networks' policies in any case, but the better reason is that a voter guide funded by whoever will pay for space beside it is not worth reading.
Getting something removed
If something here is wrong about you, say so and it will be corrected or removed, and the correction will be published. Every claim on this site carries the source it came from, so a correction can be checked as easily as the original.