Privacy

What stays in your browser

One thing: the last 5 members you opened, so the home page can offer them back to you. It is kept in your browser’s own storage under the key vl.recent, it holds each member’s name, state, party labels and years in office, and it is never sent anywhere — there is nowhere to send it to. Clearing your site data for this domain deletes it, and nothing here can read it back afterwards.

That is a deliberate limit rather than an oversight. A site about people’s political records has no business keeping a list of who you were curious about, so the list lives on your machine and the server never learns it exists.

What the site collects

Nothing. There is no sign-up, no newsletter, no analytics script, no tracking pixel and no cookie set by this site. Every page is a file built in advance; opening one sends no information anywhere beyond the request for the file itself and, on pages with a chart or a roll call, requests for the data files it draws from.

What the host sees

The pages are served by Cloudflare Pages, and the bulk vote data from Cloudflare R2. Serving a file means receiving a request for it, so their systems see what every web server sees: the address requested, the time, your IP address and your browser’s user-agent string. That is operational data held by the host under its own terms, used to deliver the site and keep it standing up. It is not collected into profiles here and is not combined with anything else on this page.

Advertising

The Vote Ledger is supported by advertising. When an ad is served it comes from Google AdSense, and Google and its advertising partners may set or read cookies and similar device identifiers in your browser to choose an ad, to cap how often you see one, and to measure whether it worked. That exchange is between you and them: the ad arrives in a frame this site reserves space for but cannot see into, and no reader data passes through this site to get there.

Where consent is required before an advertising cookie is set — the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — Google’s own consent message asks for it before any personalised ad is served, and records your answer. Wherever you are, you can turn ad personalisation off at Google Ad Settings, or opt out across many networks at once at optout.aboutads.info. Turning personalisation off does not remove the ads; it makes them less specific to you. How Google uses information from sites that use its services describes what Google does with what it collects.

What this site does promise about ads: every one is labelled, each sits in a fixed slot reserved at the page’s own size so nothing jumps as it loads, and none appears inside a chart, a table, or beside a member’s score. Nothing on this site is sold to anyone, and there is nothing to sell: the only reader data that exists is the list in your own browser described above.

Mail you send

The two forms here — reporting a wrong number, and the contact box on the About page — do not post anywhere. They assemble a message and hand it to your own mail program, which sends it to contact@thevoteledger.com. What arrives is an ordinary email: whatever you wrote, and whatever your mail provider puts in a message. It is read to fix the record and kept no longer than that takes. No form service, no ticketing system and no automated reply sits in between.

Children

This is a reference site about congressional voting records, not a service directed at children, and it knowingly collects nothing from anyone of any age. Google’s own rules bar personalised advertising to children; the ad settings linked above apply here as everywhere else.

Changes, and how to ask

This page carries the date it was last changed, at the top. If what the site does ever changes — a different ad network, anything that records a reader — this page changes first, and the date changes with it.

Questions about any of it go to contact@thevoteledger.com, the same address as everything else here.