How TruthMark covers politicians, past and present

The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations (Principle 1: Do No Harm; Principle 6: Ethical Evidence Use) is load-bearing. Politicians are public figures and most of this data is open by law, but rebroadcasting it raises real risks:

• Stale records. Campaigns file amendments. Disclosures get corrected. Candidates withdraw. Aggregators cache and lag the official source — sometimes by months.
• Editorial drift.An aggregator picks which fields to surface, which numbers to highlight, what to call “notable.” Each editorial choice is a partisan choice. We don't want to be in that business.
• Stripped disclaimers. Each regulator attaches its own legal disclaimers, ToS, and accuracy caveats — for example, the FEC notes that filings are self-reported and that the FEC does not vouch for accuracy. An aggregator silently drops those.

We don't build that. The directory + deep-link pattern keeps every search executing against the authoritative source.

Both parties get equal treatment. No editorial commentary, no curated “most controversial” lists, no scoring. Every jurisdiction's entry has the same three sub-resource shape: campaign finance, ethics, Ballotpedia. The integration cards (CA, NY, TX, FL, RI) describe what each state's regulator publishes — that's the state's rulebook, not ours.

Most states have two separate bodies (or one combined body that handles both), and they're routinely confused. The Politicians module surfaces both because they answer different questions:

• Campaign finance regulators (state board of elections, secretary of state, dedicated CF commissions like NY ELEC, MA OCPF, KY KREF, MN CFB, WA PDC) track who funded the campaign — donors, contributions, expenditures, PAC activity. Filings are tied to the candidate committee.
• Ethics commissions (FPPC, COELIG, Texas Ethics, Wisconsin Ethics, etc.) track what financial interests the official has — outside income, gifts, travel, conflicts of interest. Filings are tied to the person, not the campaign.

Some states combine the two under one body (Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board; Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics & Election Practices; Minnesota CFB; Missouri MEC; Montana COPP; Nebraska NADC; Wisconsin EC). Most don't. Our directory links to whichever body handles each function in each state.

Coverage and structure vary dramatically:

• No consolidated ethics commission — Arizona, Idaho, Michigan, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Wyoming. Financial disclosures go to the Secretary of State or are handled internally by the legislature. Entries flag this honestly.
• Campaign finance handled by the ethics body — Texas, Iowa, Louisiana (filings to Board of Ethics, not SOS), Massachusetts (OCPF independent of SOS), Missouri, Wisconsin, Oklahoma. Our directory points at the actual filer, not the front-door agency.
• Recently reorganized — Kansas (KPDC, ~2024–2025); New York (COELIG replaced JCOPE in 2022); Pennsylvania (migrated to pa.gov/agencies/* in 2025); Wisconsin (Government Accountability Board split in 2015 into Ethics Commission + Elections Commission).
• Threshold-only disclosure — varies by state and office. Some states require disclosure only above a contribution threshold; some publish only contested-election filings.
• Territories — most lack a standalone ethics commission. American Samoa, Guam, CNMI, USVI entries link to the closest available accountability office (Public Auditor, Inspector General, AG). Puerto Rico has both CEE (campaign finance) and OEG (ethics), but their .pr.gov subdomains routinely fail TLS from outside PR — we use the .org/.com mirrors.

Ballotpedia (Lucy Burns Institute) is a nonpartisan encyclopedia of American politics — not a regulator. We include it because:

• Coverage breadth. Federal, state, and many local races. Every officeholder gets a profile page with election history, prior offices, and party.
• Neutrality. Long-standing editorial commitment to nonpartisanship; cited by both sides of most political debates as a reliable reference.
• Historical depth.Profiles of past officeholders that primary regulators don't maintain online (e.g., a state legislator who served in the 1990s).

Ballotpedia is not authoritative for filings — for the actual campaign-finance and ethics records, the regulator's site is the source of truth. Ballotpedia is the starting reference, not the ending one.

Different levels of office file with different bodies:

• Federal candidates (U.S. House, Senate, President) file with the Federal Election Commission (fec.gov). Members of Congress also file annual financial disclosures: House with the Office of the Clerk, Senate with the Office of Public Records (eFD).
• State candidates (governor, state legislature, statewide offices) file with the state regulator listed in the directory. Federal candidates who happen to live in a state are NOT covered by the state regulator — they file federally.
• Local candidates(city council, school board, mayor, county offices) typically file with the local clerk, not the state. We don't cover local filings — too fragmented to maintain a deep-link directory of ~5,000+ municipalities accurately.

The module title is “Past & Present” deliberately. Different sources work for different time windows:

• Current officeholders — primary regulator (FEC, state CF, state ethics) has the freshest data. Ballotpedia for biographical context.
• Recent past (last few years) — most state regulators retain filings online. State CF portals typically retain filings 5–10 years; some longer. The regulator's site explains its retention rules.
• Historical federal officials — the Library of Congress Bioguide (bioguide.congress.gov) has every U.S. Congress member back to 1774. Ballotpedia covers the modern era well.
• Historical state officials — vary by state. Most have a state library, archives division, or Secretary of State historical-records office. Ballotpedia often covers these too. We don't link to state archives individually because it's not a deep-link target — it's a research starting point.

• Whether someone is “corrupt.” That's a judgment call, not a record. We surface what the regulator publishes; you decide.
• Pending complaints or investigations. Most ethics commissions keep open investigations confidential until they result in formal action. Closed cases are public; ongoing ones aren't.
• Local-office filings. City council, school board, county. These exist with local clerks but we don't maintain a directory of ~5,000+ municipalities.
• Independent expenditures via “dark money” vehicles. 501(c)(4) organizations have substantial campaign-related spending that doesn't show up in candidate-committee filings. The IRS Form 990 (covered by our Nonprofits module) is the closest public window into those organizations.