Resolve the ballot, not the person

What happens when you enter an address

• Your address is sent to our server in the body of a POST request — never as a URL query string, so it cannot appear in browser history, a referrer header, or a web server access log.
• The server passes it to the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder to determine which districts contain it.
• If Census has no record of it — common on streets built in the last few years — the server asks OpenStreetMap where the street is, sending the street, city, state and ZIP but never the house number. Census boundaries still decide every district.
• We keep the resulting district identifiers and discard the address. It is not written to a database, a log, or an analytics event.
• The response is marked no-store so no shared cache or CDN retains it.

Precise coordinates are discarded immediately

Geocoding returns a latitude and longitude precise enough to identify a single household. We use it for the point-in-polygon lookup and then drop it. It is never returned to the browser, stored, or logged.

Share links contain districts, not addresses

When you share a ballot, the link contains a jurisdiction signature — a state, a county, and district numbers. Every household in those districts produces the identical signature, often tens of thousands of them. There is nothing in the link to trace back to an address.

Cookies and advertising

Ballot Explained is free, and it is paid for by advertising served through Google AdSense. Advertising is how the site stays free without accounts, subscriptions, or selling anyone’s data.

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a visitor’s prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings. You can also opt out of some third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalized advertising at aboutads.info.
• Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are asked for consent before personalized ads are shown, and can decline.

Google describes how it uses data from sites that show its ads in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

Advertisers never receive your address, and nothing you look up is used to target an ad. Ads are always labeled, and they are never placed inside a candidate comparison or between a claim and its source.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used — whether a lookup completed, whether an explanation was opened, whether a ballot was shared. Google Analytics sets cookies to do this. We run it with IP anonymization on, and with Google signals and ad personalization signals turned off, so analytics data is not used to build advertising profiles.

We measure behavior, not politics. We do not record, infer, or ask about anyone’s political preferences, and we never ask how you voted or intend to vote. Because addresses are never placed in a URL, no analytics page view can contain one.

Third parties

Only one external service ever receives your full address: the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder, and it receives the address alone — no identifier, no session, nothing else about you. When Census has no record of it, OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service receives the street, city, state and ZIP, without the house number, and nothing else about you.

Google receives the information any website you visit shares with the services it uses — your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you view, and the cookies described above — through Google Analytics and Google AdSense. It never receives your address.

Addresses are never included in prompts to any AI service. The explanation feature receives an office identifier and a district label — for example “District 5” — and nothing more.

Public voter records

Many states publish voter registration data, and some of it is public by law. That does not make it ours to aggregate. Ballot Explained does not build profiles of individual voters, and the address-first design exists specifically so that we never need to identify one.

Children

Ballot Explained is a general-audience civic resource. It does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

Changes to this policy

If we change what the site collects or who it shares information with, we update this page and the date at the top of it.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or anything else on this page: hello@ballotexplained.com. See also our contact page.