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
The short version
We do not want your data and we have not built anything to collect it.
No analytics, no advertising trackers, no third-party embeds, no fingerprinting, no accounts. You can read every page on this site without identifying yourself, and there is nothing to opt out of because there is nothing running.
Given what this site is about, that seemed like the only defensible position: a site that tracks how you read about your representatives has a conflict at the heart of it.
02
What is stored
Two things, and one of them never leaves your browser.
Your light or dark theme preference. Kept in your browser’s local storage so the site does not flash white at night. It is not a cookie, is never sent to us, and clearing site data removes it.
Ordinary web server logs. Our host records requests — address, page, time, browser — as every web server does. We do not analyse them for behaviour or build profiles from them.
The host’s log retention period is not documented here yet. It is set by the hosting provider rather than by us, and this page should name the actual figure rather than a comfortable guess. It must be confirmed and stated before launch.
03
What we do not do
Stated explicitly, because absence is hard to verify from the outside.
- No Google Analytics or any other analytics package.
- No advertising, retargeting or social pixels.
- No selling, renting or sharing of data. There is no data to sell.
- No cross-site tracking, and no third-party fonts, scripts or embeds that would allow it.
- No attempt to identify you, and no linking of your reading to any voter record.
This is checkable: open your browser’s network inspector on any page and look at what it requests.
04
Voter data, and why you cannot look anyone up here
This is the part people are right to ask about.
Washington voter registration records are public under RCW 29A.08.720, restricted to political purposes, with penalties for misuse under RCW 29A.08.740.
We use them only in aggregate — registration and turnout by district or precinct. No individual voter record is published, exported, or kept in our code repository. There is no lookup on this site and there will not be one.
Officials and candidates are treated differently, and that difference is deliberate: they sought public power, so their votes, filings and donors are the subject of the site. Private individuals are not named — see the naming rule.
05
If a page is about you
Being on this site is not something you opted into.
If you hold or sought office in Washington, pages here describe your public record, drawn from filings you or your campaign made with the state. We will not remove an accurate public record on request — that is the whole purpose of the site — but we will correct anything wrong, fast, and we would rather hear from you than not.
If you are not a candidate or an official and you have found yourself named here, that may itself be the error. Tell us at corrections@washingtonindependents.org and we will take it down while we check.
06
The launch notification list
The one place where we ask for anything.
The pre-launch page offers to email you once, when the site goes live. That address is used for that single message and nothing else — no newsletter, no sharing, no onward use.
The mailing-list provider is not named here yet. Handing an address to a third-party service is exactly the kind of thing this page exists to disclose, so the provider must be named before any address is collected. The sign-up form on the holding page is not currently wired to anything.