Release Notes

Last updated August 13, 2026

What changed and when, newest first. Content, data corrections, and fixes — the things that change what you read or how your ballot behaves.

August 13, 2026

Names are now in ballot order. The Secretary of State drew the randomized alphabet this morning — the state does not order candidates A to Z, it draws a new order of the alphabet for each election and sorts surnames by that. We ingested the drawing, and 85 of the 178 contested races on this site changed order as a result. The order you read here is the order on the paper in your hand.
One caveat we’d rather state than bury. California also rotates the drawn alphabet by district for many offices, and we do not implement rotation. So this is the correct statewide order — far closer to your ballot than what we showed yesterday — but for some races the exact order in your specific district can still differ.

We tell you the facts behind the headlines. There’s news about Nithya Raman being fired from her chairmanship role in the Housing and Homelessness Committee, after she moved against a consensus that successfully voted 13-1 to split the organization. We now have a daily Newspaper agent that checks for developments across high-profile contests such as the Mayoral and Governor’s races. Issues appear as an accordion in the new Recent News section, so you can dive deeper. And of course, any new source recalculates that contest’s objectivity score.

Every candidate race on the ballot now has authored profiles — all 182 of them, statewide. Writing them meant expanding the source list from 36 sources to 60, and the payoff shows in the floor rather than the average: the lowest objectivity score of any contest is now 83, up from 74, with no contest left in the “mixed” band.
Legislative records, with the context that makes them readable. We’re experimenting with showing what a candidate in office has actually done, and adding context wherever a raw count would mislead by itself: Robert Rivas authored one bill because Speakers rarely author, and Jesse Gabriel authored several times more than anyone else because Budget chairs are nominal authors on every trailer bill. A number without its role is not a record.
Every source carries the date we last retrieved it, and the build refuses a source that has gone stale for its kind — a certified canvas never expires, a campaign-finance export does. Each contest shows its own last-updated date in the Sources panel.

Our internal documentation is checked every weekday. A routine runs Monday through Friday and holds the docs to the same standard as the code: a claim that something is checked has to be checkable. Not weekends — robots get tired too.

Fixed a bug that could have moved your saved pick to the wrong candidate. Picks were stored by a candidate’s position in the list, so any reordering of the ballot would have silently reattached your pick to whoever landed on that spot. Picks are now tied to the person. Two reorderings were already scheduled when we caught it, which is why it was fixed before either one. If a pick ever can’t be matched to a person, it is cleared rather than guessed.
Write-in candidates are labelled — 24 candidates carried forward from the June primary are now annotated as such.
Unopposed races are cleaned up. This applied to four Assembly contests: Districts 4, 8, 22, and 32.
Withdrawals and disqualifications now have somewhere to live. If a candidate leaves the race, we label it plainly on their line. Their name stays visible and their oval stays live, because California does not reprint ballots for a late withdrawal — the name is still on the paper in your hand, and whether to vote for them is your call, not ours.
Prepared for the August 13 ballot drawing. We will ingest the state’s randomized-alphabet drawing so the order of names on this site matches the order on your paper ballot.
We now meet WCAG 2.2 AA, checked automatically before every push, in light and dark, on mobile and desktop. More remains to do.