How TruthMark covers election integrity

The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations (Principle 1: Do No Harm; Principle 4: Provenance) is load-bearing here. Election data is uniquely sensitive:

• Voter records have privacy and harassment implications. Voter rolls are public in most states but with state-specific restrictions (commercial use, redistribution, automated scraping). Aggregating them into a third-party search interface is the kind of fresh attack surface Berkeley Principle 1 warns against.
• Composite politician scores are editorial. Which votes count, what weighting, what counts as a “pro-X” vote — these are advocacy choices. Mixing them into a directory layer puts our voice on equal footing with the authoritative source, which is exactly what we don't want.
• State election authorities update faster than any aggregator. Voter registration changes, candidate filings, and campaign finance updates all happen on the state SOS's timeline. Any third-party copy is stale by the time it's indexed.

We don't aggregate. We don't score. We point you at the state authority that has the authoritative record and the legal disclaimers attached, and at the federal regulators that handle their specific federal jurisdictions.

U.S. election administration is federated by design. The U.S. Constitution gives states the authority to run elections; federal agencies have narrower roles. Confusing the two leads to bad reporting and bad policy:

• FEC — administers and enforces federal campaign-finance law. Covers federal candidates, committees, and PACs. Does NOT run elections.
• EAC — develops voluntary voting-system standards (VVSG), certifies voting systems, distributes HAVA grants. Established by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA, 2002) after the 2000 election. Does NOT run elections.
• CISA — federal lead for election infrastructure cybersecurity. Coordinates with state and local officials; does NOT run elections.
• DOJ Civil Rights Division (Voting Section) — enforces the Voting Rights Act, NVRA, HAVA, UOCAVA. Brings DOJ litigation against jurisdictions that violate federal voting-rights law.
• DOJ Public Integrity Section (Election Crimes Branch)— federal prosecution of election-fraud crimes. Each U.S. Attorney's Office has a District Election Officer (DEO).
• State chief elections officer — runs voter registration, candidate filings, ballot review, and election administration. The title varies: Secretary of State (most states), Lieutenant Governor (AK, UT), Department of Elections (DE, VA), or bipartisan Board of Elections (NY, IL, KY, NC, OK, SC, WI).

The directory reflects this federated structure. The federal cross-reference appears in the blue box; state authorities appear per-jurisdiction with notes on each state's specific arrangement.

Voters legitimately want a quick read on a politician's record. Five third-party organizations publish exactly that — openly editorial, with their methodology public: see the scorecards page for First Focus Campaign for Children, CDF Action Council, Vote Smart, FollowTheMoney, and Ballotpedia.

These organizations own the editorial framing publicly: First Focus and CDF are explicitly child-advocacy groups who weight votes by their assessment of child impact; Vote Smart aggregates dozens of third-party ratings without editorializing itself; FollowTheMoney reports raw filings; Ballotpedia is neutral-encyclopedic. A reader can pick the framing that matches what they want to know.

What we don't do — and won't — is build a TruthMark- branded composite score. A “Child-First Score” or equivalent is a legitimate product, but it's a different product from a directory. Mixing them dilutes both. If TruthMark ever ships a politician scorecard, it will be on a separate site with a separate brand and explicit editorial framing — not folded into the directory.

The most-asked election question is “who represents me?” — at the federal, state, and local level. The federal government publishes the canonical answer to that question at usa.gov/elected-officials.

We deep-link there from the federal cross-reference rather than building a TruthMark-hosted address-to-officials lookup. Reasons:

• USA.gov is authoritative. The GSA maintains canonical handoffs to USPS for ZIP→district resolution and to House.gov / Senate.gov / state-legislator finders. A TruthMark-hosted version would lag.
• The Google Civic Information API has been deprecating its representatives endpoint. Building a feature on top of a deprecating API is not a stable architecture. The Census Geocoder + per-state SOS lookups remain stable and free.
• Per-jurisdiction lookups are already in the directory. Once a user knows their state, the state directory entry includes the SOS's voter-registration verifier, which itself returns the user's assigned districts and polling place.

Two-click flow: (1) usa.gov/elected-officials for federal representation; (2) your state's voter-registration verifier (in the directory) for state and local representation. No aggregation, no API key required, fully resilient to upstream deprecation.

• Whether a specific candidate is “qualified.” That's an editorial / advocacy question. We surface the authoritative records (filings, voting record on Congress.gov, campaign finance via FEC and state regulators); the reader does the interpretation.
• Whether an election was “stolen.” Election outcomes are certified by state election authorities and adjudicated through state and federal courts. We deep-link to state SOS results and federal court records (CourtListener, in the Courts module). We don't adjudicate disputes, and we don't platform unverified claims.
• Real-time results on election night. State SOS sites publish official results on their own timeline (sometimes weeks). News outlets call races based on AP / state reporting; those are NOT certifications. We point at the authoritative state source for the certified result.
• The scoring of individual votes as “good” or “bad.” Vote Smart aggregates dozens of third-party ratings; First Focus and CDF publish child-welfare scorecards; Ballotpedia describes without scoring. We point at all of them. See third-party scorecards.
• Voter rolls. Most states make voter rolls available to qualified parties (parties, candidates, journalists) for limited purposes, with restrictions on commercial and harassment use. TruthMark does not host or redistribute voter rolls.

• Three states have no Secretary of State for elections. Alaska and Utah route elections through the Lieutenant Governor; Hawaii through an independent Office of Elections under the LG.
• Seven states administer elections through a bipartisan board. New York (State Board of Elections), Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin all administer elections through a board rather than the SOS.
• Two states have an independent Department of Elections. Delaware and Virginia administer elections through executive- branch agencies independent of the SOS.
• North Dakota does not require voter registration. The only U.S. state with no registration system. Eligibility is confirmed at the polls via ID.
• State campaign-finance regulator ≠ SOS in many states. Texas Ethics Commission, NJ ELEC, NY State Board of Elections, MA OCPF, KY KREF, CT SEEC, NH BOE/Sec State, and most state ethics-and-finance boards are formally separate from the SOS. The directory reflects each state's actual arrangement.
• Territories vote differently. Puerto Rico, Guam, USVI, CNMI, and American Samoa residents vote in territorial elections. Most do not vote in U.S. presidential general elections (American Samoans are U.S. nationals, not citizens by birth). Each territory has its own election commission; the directory deep-links to all five.