Privacy

This site records political opinions, which is about as sensitive as personal data gets. The policy below describes what the code actually does. Where something is a deliberate choice rather than a technical necessity, it says so.

What we hold

• A username. Public. It appears beside every position and comment you make.
• An email address. Private. Used to send password resets and nothing else — there is no mailing list and no marketing email.
• A password, stored only as a bcrypt hash. Nobody, including the person running the site, can read it.
• A ZIP code, if you give one. Used once to work out your congressional district, then shown only as a label like CO-2. It's optional, and the site works without it.
• Your positions, comments and election calls. Public, under your username. That's the point of the site.
• A record of which days you were active. A date, never a page. See below.

What we deliberately don't hold

• No browsing history. The site records that you were active on a given day, not what you looked at. A page-level log would reveal which bills you read and chose not to vote on, which is an inferred political profile you never offered. That data doesn't exist, so it can't be handed over, sold, or leaked.
• No tracking cookies and no advertising network. One cookie exists: the one that keeps you signed in. Traffic statistics come from Vercel Web Analytics, which is cookieless, stores no identifier, and cannot be joined back to your account.
• No selling or sharing. Your data is not sold, rented, or shared with advertisers or data brokers. There is no business model here that would want it.

Your alignment is private by default

The Needle — the summary of which way your voting record leans — is off until you turn it on. Your individual positions are public either way; it's the summary that's yours to publish or not. Your setting.

Who else is involved

Running a site means using other people's computers. These are all of them:

• Vercel — hosting and cookieless traffic statistics.
• Neon — the database, hosted in the United States.
• Resend — sends password-reset email.
• Cloudflare Turnstile — blocks automated signups.

Congressional and campaign-finance data comes from public records — congress.gov, the Clerk of the House, the Senate, GovInfo and the FEC. That's information about elected officials, not about you.

Deleting your account

In settings, whenever you like, with no email to anyone. It erases your email, ZIP, district and password, deletes your positions and election calls, and replaces your username with an anonymous one so nothing left points back at you.

Comments are the exception, and you choose. By default they stay in their threads with your name gone, because other people's replies stop making sense without them. You can tick a box to withdraw the text as well. Either way, nothing remains attributed to you.

Blocking

You can block anyone, which hides their comments from you. It is private, they aren't told, and it doesn't hide your comments from them. Blocked accounts.

Moderation

Removed comments are published in the moderation log with the rule they broke. The log names the comment and the rule; it exists to hold moderators to account rather than to pillory the author.

Children

This site isn't intended for under-13s and no account should be created by one.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes in a way that affects what's collected, the date above changes and the change will be announced on the site. For anything about your data, email privacy@votewire.com.

If you're in the UK, EU or California you have rights to access, correct, export and erase your data. The delete button does the erasure immediately; for anything else, use the address above.