This page is a pre-launch draft. It is published rather than held back because the promises it describes are already on the site, and a reader who wants to check them should not meet a missing page. Where a detail is still unsettled, it is marked as unsettled rather than filled in.
01
Where the data comes from
Five public sources. Each is wrong in a different direction, which is what makes crossing them useful.
| Source | What it gives | Known limitation |
|---|---|---|
| WA Legislature web services | Member roster, roll-call votes, sponsorship, committee membership, hearings, bill status | Roll calls are floor votes only. Committee votes are not published in a machine-readable form. |
| Public Disclosure Commission | Contributions, expenditures, candidate filings, independent expenditures | Donor employer is self-reported and often blank. Mini-reporting hides most small filers. |
| WA Secretary of State | Official election results 2014–2025, districts and precincts | Results are certified totals; they do not explain a race. |
| Voter Registration Database | Registration and turnout, aggregate only | No individual record reaches a page or an export. See section 05. |
| Governor’s office | Executive cabinet membership | Current cabinet only. No start or end dates, and nobody who has left. |
Source all five are public records published by Washington State · read directly, not via aggregators
02
How a claim is graded
Every published claim carries one of four statuses. They are not interchangeable and the site never blurs them.
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| documented | The record itself shows it. A roll call, a filing, a certified result. |
| reported | A news organization reported it. We name which, and it stays attributed. |
| alleged | A party asserts it. The assertion is the fact; the underlying claim is not. |
| adjudicated | A body with authority decided it. We name the body and the decision. |
A fifth state exists internally — needs verification — and is never published in any form. It is not held back behind a login or marked provisional on the page. It is absent.
03
Where records are joined, and how we handle being unsure
The record and the PDC share no common identifier. Connecting an officeholder to their campaign filings is a judgement, and it is the place this site could do the most damage.
A surname is not enough — it pairs one Hansen with another. A match is made only when surname and given name agree together with two further facts, and only one person fits. That is four independent facts. Across the record that resolves 1,938 of 13,879 officials.
The rest are left unmatched and their pages say so, and 45 are refused outright because more than one person fits. Where two people fit, we publish nothing — attributing one person’s donors to another is the worst error available to us, and a blank section is strictly better than a confident wrong one.
Every page that rests on a match discloses that it is a match rather than a lookup, names the four facts that agreed, and invites you to tell us if it is wrong.
04
When we name a private individual
Washington campaign-finance filings contain 1.4 million donor records. Naming them all would be both useless and wrong.
The default is that individuals are not named and get no page. A private citizen who gave money to a campaign has done a lawful, ordinary thing, and it does not make them a public figure.
An individual is named only where their own public conduct puts them on the public record, in one of three ways:
- They hold or seek public office, or appear in a government org chart. They are already a public figure.
- They delivered legislative testimony. Testifying is a public act, on the record, by choice.
- They gave the legal maximum and are otherwise active in the political record. Hitting a statutory ceiling is a deliberate political act, not incidental giving — but on its own it is not enough, so a one-time max donor with no other footprint stays unnamed.
All three are about conduct, not about the size of a cheque alone.
05
Voter data
Washington voter records are public, and that does not make every use of them acceptable.
RCW 29A.08.720 makes the voter file a public record restricted to political purposes; RCW 29A.08.740 carries penalties for misuse. We use it only in aggregate — registration and turnout by district or precinct.
No individual voter record reaches a page, an export, or our source code repository. You cannot look someone up here, and that is deliberate.
06
What is missing
Published here rather than left to be discovered, because a limitation you find yourself is one you were not told about.
Committee votes are not covered. Only floor roll calls are published in machine-readable form, so a member’s committee record is not on their page.
Legislative testimony is not loaded. Who showed up to speak for whom is a real accountability channel and we do not have it yet.
Agency leadership is a snapshot, not a history. We hold the current executive cabinet with no tenure dates. Someone who ran an agency until recently does not appear — treat an absence as “not currently serving”, never as “never served”.
Donor employer is patchy. The field is filled in by the donor and left blank more often than not, so any employer or same-day-giving analysis is a floor, not a full picture. The pages that use it state their coverage rate.
Six legislators have no matched filing. Their filings exist at the PDC; our roster is missing a name field needed to tie them together with confidence.
07
Checking our work
The point of a source line is that you can go and look.
Every data section names its source and the date it was read, and campaign-finance sections link to the filing at the PDC. If a figure here disagrees with the state’s, the state is right and we want to know: corrections@washingtonindependents.org.