About
About & sources
Whose site this is, where the facts on it come from, how often they are read again, and how to tell us when something is wrong.
An independent project
Know Your Candidate is an independent, non-partisan project. Its code and data are public, at https://github.com/pkplaya626/Know-Your-Candidate, so anyone can see how each fact was reached, and every change to them is recorded there.
It is not affiliated with any campaign, party, candidate or government office, takes no money from any of them, and carries no advertising. It is served by GitHub Pages.
What this site is not
It is not an official election source, and nothing on it is legal advice. Before you register, request a ballot or vote, check with your state's election office: each state's page here links its official voting pages, and NASS Can I Vote lists every state's.
Report a problem
This site makes claims about real, named people, and a wrong one matters. If something is wrong, out of date or missing, or a page does not work for you, open a report on GitHub (it needs a free GitHub account). Every profile and page has the same link, which fills in where you were. Please say what is wrong and, if you can, where the right answer is published.
Reports and the corrections made from them are public: each is an issue in the repository, and each fix a change anyone can read.
Where the data comes from
Most facts are read from a named source by a script and checked before they are published. The decisions no source can settle alone, and what a person read from an office's own page where no script can (each state's voting dates, a ballot printed as a PDF, a court roster its site will not serve to a script), are kept by hand in the repository, where each change is public. A member's biography and priorities are never typed in: each is read from a source tied to them and says which. Where a source says nothing, the site says so, rather than guessing. The repository's README lists every field and where it comes from.
| Data | Source | Covers | Read again | Last read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Members of Congress | congress-legislators | Every member: seat, party, term, contact details, ids for outbound links | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Members' biographies and priorities | Official Congressional Directory; the Wikipedia article congress-legislators links to each member; each member's official website; congress-legislators' district offices | Education and earlier careers in the Directory's words; the issues a member's own site lists; a checked contact form; offices at home | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Editorial decisions | This site's repository: each decision recorded with its evidence and date | What no source can settle alone: a lapsed campaign site, one person filed under two names | When a change is needed; each change is a public commit | Each decision gives its date |
| Committee seats | congress-legislators | Each committee's members, with their rank and title | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Who is running, and their money | Federal Election Commission | Everyone registered for 2026; receipts, spending and cash on hand | Each scheduled refresh | Each profile gives the date its figures run through |
| Primary and November results, and who is on the ballot | Each state's results page on Wikipedia; Louisiana's Secretary of State for its qualified candidates | Who won, lost or withdrew; who was on the November ballot and who won it | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Financial disclosures | House Clerk and Senate eFD | A link to each member's latest annual report | Each scheduled refresh | Each profile names its report's year |
| Voting record | Voteview | A left-to-right score from each member's roll-call votes | By hand, from time to time | – |
| Campaign websites and candidates' own words | Each committee's FEC filing; the article a race page links; the campaign's own site | Websites, and what a campaign says about itself, quoted | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Public offices held | congress-legislators; Wikidata, where the person's own Wikipedia article agrees | Offices each person has held, with years | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Market prices and polling averages | Kalshi, Polymarket; each race's Wikipedia page for polling averages | Published prices and averages, never a forecast of this site's | Every 12 hours, until polls close | Each price gives the day it was read |
| Governors and party control | National Governors Association; Open States and the National Conference of State Legislatures | Every governor; which party holds each chamber, where the two agree | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Statewide officers | NLGA, NASS, the attorneys general's associations, and each office's own site | Lieutenant governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general | Each scheduled refresh | |
| State legislators | Open States | Every state legislator and their district | Each scheduled refresh | |
| State supreme courts | Each court's own page or roster file. Where a court's site refuses automated reading, a person reads its page; each state's page says how and on which day | Each state's highest court | Each scheduled refresh; a roster read by hand, by a person within 45 days | |
| Voting information | NASS Can I Vote | Each state's official pages to register, find a polling place and vote | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Statewide ballot questions | Each election office's own list, voter guide or official sample ballots | The statewide questions on the Nov 3, 2026 ballot, in their official words | By hand, and again by a second reader | Each state's page gives the day its list was read |
| President, Vice President and Cabinet | The White House, each office's own page, the Senate's roll calls | Who holds each office, and since when | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Executive financial reports | Office of Government Ethics | Reports filed by the President, Vice President and Cabinet | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Federal judges | Federal Judicial Center; the Supreme Court | Every sitting Article III judge | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Judicial vacancies | uscourts.gov | Vacancies, announced vacancies and judicial emergencies | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Local governments | Census of Governments (2022) | Every county, city, town, township, school district and special district | Fixed: counted in 2022 | |
| Tribal governments | BIA Tribal Leaders Directory | Each tribal government, the state of its office, and its leader | Each scheduled refresh | |
| Maps | U.S. Census Bureau boundary files; each redrawn state's enacted plan | States, congressional and legislative districts, counties, places | When a map changes | – |
| Know Your Government | The primary sources each section cites | How government is organized, in plain words | Checked by hand; each page gives its date | – |
The scheduled refresh runs every day from Oct. 15 to Nov. 2, 2026 and from Nov. 4 to Dec. 15, 2026, the weeks before the election and the six weeks after it, and from Jan. 3 to Jan. 14, 2027, as the new Congress is sworn in. On other days it runs on Mondays and Thursdays before Election Day and on Mondays after it. Each run is published only once every check passes. Market prices and polling averages are read every 12 hours, at 00:47 and 12:47 UTC, and stop when the first polls close on Election Day: prices that move on early returns would read as results.
Who counts as a candidate: everyone the FEC records as having raised or spent more than $5,000 for the 2026 cycle (52 U.S.C. §30101(2)). Everyone who has registered is counted in each race, whatever they raised.
Privacy
- No cookies, no analytics, no advertising trackers and no accounts. The site does not know who you are.
- Your browser keeps two settings for this site, on your device only: the theme you picked and the last state you looked at, so the navigation can offer it again. To clear them, clear this site's data in your browser's settings.
- Portraits and some images load from the sites that publish them: Wikimedia Commons, the House Clerk, Congress.gov, state legislatures, state officers' offices and their associations, and campaign sites, some of them through WordPress.com's image service (i0.wp.com), which serves a heavy photograph at a smaller size. Those sites see your IP address when your browser fetches an image, as any website would; this site asks your browser not to tell them which page you were reading.
- “Find my district” and “Find who represents you” ask your browser for your location, or take a ZIP code you type, and look it up on your device, in this site’s own file for your state. Neither is ever sent anywhere; the host sees only which state’s file was fetched, as it would for that state’s page.
- The site is served by GitHub Pages, which receives your IP address with each request, as any web host does; see GitHub’s privacy statement. Links out lead to other sites, whose own policies apply.
Accessibility
The site aims to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. Every page is built and checked by automated tests on each change: pages can be zoomed; every control works from a keyboard, with a visible focus; dialogs hold the focus and return it when they close; each page has a link to skip to its content; fields are large enough on a phone that it does not zoom on its own; and the words on the maps are page text, so they stay readable in forced dark modes.
Known limits: the maps are visual. On a map of the states, each state is a button that names it, and picking one shows its facts as text, but no view lists every state's value at once. Documents this site links, such as disclosure PDFs and the Senate's disclosure site, are their publishers' and may not be accessible. If anything here is hard to use, tell us with the same form.
Licence
The code is under the MIT licence. The data this project compiles is under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): you may reuse it, with credit to Know Your Candidate and the dates the data carries. Photographs, and the datasets this project reads, keep their own owners' terms: each photograph on a profile or an official's record is credited under it, a Wikimedia Commons file with its author and licence as the file's own page records them; a state officer's in the sources line of their state's card.