Privacy policy

Reading bills, dashboards, summaries and scores requires no account and no sign-in. We do not run Google Analytics, Meta pixels, or any other third-party analytics or advertising tag — you can verify that by viewing source on any page.

Our servers keep ordinary web request logs, which include IP address and browser user agent, for security and debugging. We do not use those logs to build a profile of you or to target advertising.

Accounts exist so your watchlist and saved location survive a browser change. You can sign in with Google or with an email address and password.

Identity

Your email address, display name, profile picture URL if you signed in with Google, and the time of your last login. Passwords, when you use one, are handled by our authentication backend and are never stored in readable form.

Saved location

If you set a location, we store the resulting district information — state, city, congressional and state legislative districts, and your matched representatives — so the dashboard can filter to bills that reach you.

Watchlist and activity

The bills you choose to follow, and enough activity history to show you what changed since you last looked.

That is the whole list. We do not ask for a phone number, a mailing address, a date of birth, a party registration, or anything about how you vote — and we would have no use for them if you offered.

Setting a location is optional, and there are two ways to do it. You can type a ZIP code or address, or you can let the browser share your coordinates. Coordinates are only ever read after your browser asks you and you agree; we never take them silently, and declining costs you nothing but the convenience.

Either way, what we send onward is used to resolve districts and representatives. We store the resolved district, not a continuous trail of where you have been. We do not track your location in the background, and there is no mobile app doing so either.

Some things live on your device rather than on our servers, which means they are cleared when you clear your browser data:

Session storage

Your access token while you are signed in. It is discarded when you close the tab.

Session cookie

An HttpOnly cookie that keeps you signed in. It cannot be read by scripts, and it is not an advertising cookie — there are none on this site.

Local storage

Preferences (language, market, sidebar state), your most recent location, and a cache of bills and analyses so pages you have already opened load instantly. This is a performance cache, not a record of your reading history sent anywhere.

The legislative providers listed on the data sources page receive requests for bill records. Those requests come from our servers and identify us, not you.

Bill text is sent to Google's Gemini API to generate summaries and scores. When you ask a question about a bill, your question is sent along with it. Do not put personal information into that box — treat it as you would any search field on a public site.

If you sign in with Google, Google knows you signed in to Vote Impact, and their privacy policy governs that. We do not sell personal information to anyone, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Account data is kept while your account exists. Delete your account and the identity, saved location and watchlist attached to it are deleted with it. Request logs are kept only as long as they are useful for security and debugging.

Cached bills and analyses are not personal data — they are copies of public records and our own writing, and they persist independently of any account.

You can browse anonymously and never create an account. You can decline the location prompt. You can clear everything stored on your device by clearing site data in your browser. And you can ask us to delete your account and its data by writing to contact@voteimpact.org from the address on the account.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional statutory rights of access, correction, portability or erasure. Ask and we will honour them.

Vote Impact is built for the general public, including students using it in class, but accounts are not intended for children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. The site is fully readable without an account, which is how a classroom should use it.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, the date at the top of this page changes with it. Questions about any of it go to contact@voteimpact.org or through the contact page.