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
What this is
A public-records site for Washington State politics: who holds office, who paid for the campaign, and what the record shows they did.
Everything here is assembled from records the state already publishes — the Legislature’s own web services, Public Disclosure Commission filings, and Secretary of State election results. We do not break news and we do not run investigations off anonymous sources. The work is joining records that are public but scattered, and presenting them so a question like who represents me and who funded them takes one page instead of five databases.
The gap this fills is specific. Official .gov pages carry biography and contact details. Encyclopedia entries carry prose positions. Neither carries voting records next to donors, and nothing carries what quietly failed — the bills that died without a hearing, the seats where nobody filed to run.
02
The rules we hold ourselves to
These are constraints on us, not features. They are the reason to trust a figure on this site more than a figure without them.
Every figure carries its source and its date. Not a bibliography at the bottom — a source line on the section it belongs to, naming what was read and when.
A gap is stated, never hidden. An empty section is a bug. If we do not have something, the page says what is missing and why, because “no votes shown” and “did not vote” are different facts and confusing them defames people.
We refuse rather than guess. Where a record could mean two people, we publish nothing. You will see this on the site: pages that say plainly that more than one person fits and so the section stays empty.
Private individuals are not named. 1.4 million donor records appear in Washington campaign-finance filings. Almost all are private citizens whose politics are their own business, and they get no page and no mention. See the naming rule.
Party never changes how a page looks. It appears as a 3px mark and a letter, never as the colour of a page, so a Republican page and a Democratic page carry identical visual weight. The same figures get shown the same way whoever they are about, and a record we would rather not have found gets published anyway.
03
What this is not
Worth being direct about, because several of these are what people assume on arrival.
It is not a scandal site. Most of what is published is unremarkable and should be: a legislator’s votes, their sponsorships, their donors. Patterns worth a second look are shown as patterns, with the innocent explanations named alongside.
It is not complete, and the gaps are listed in the methodology rather than left for you to discover.
04
Who publishes this
The single fact a reader most needs in order to weigh everything else on the site.
Washington Independents will be published by a political committee registered with the Washington Public Disclosure Commission. That committee is not registered yet, so this page does not name it.
Naming it now would be a claim about who publishes this that no filing supports — the same kind of unbacked statement this site refuses to print about anyone else.
Until then there is no organization behind it. Nothing here is sponsored, there is no advertising, and no outside party pays for or approves what appears. Costs — hosting, a domain, data storage — are met privately.
When the committee is registered it will be named here, with its PDC filer id and its own filings linked, before it takes a cent. A site that publishes other people’s funding has no business being vague about its own — and because it will file with the PDC, its money will appear in the same data set as everyone else’s on this site.
This section cannot be completed yet. The publisher is a political committee that has not been registered. Its name, its PDC filer id, and the political activity of the people behind it all belong here, and all three are outstanding rather than omitted quietly — a disclosure page with a hole in it should show the hole.
05
Getting in touch
One address, read by a person.
Press, tips, questions about method, and anything else: editor@washingtonindependents.org.
If something here is wrong — about you or about anyone — use corrections@washingtonindependents.org instead, and see Corrections for what happens next. It is a separate address so that a report of an error is never sitting behind routine mail.