Release Notes

September 29, 2026

• Brand refresh! Time for some whimsy and fun. We all deserve it. Rugrats - sue us, we’ve all been very naughty.

September 24, 2026

• Candidate profiles rewritten for every race for Congress, State Senate, Assembly and the Board of Equalization. Profiles were falling short of our own standard: they restated campaign finance instead of saying who the candidate is. Each now opens with the person’s record, what they say drives them, and what they promise, in their own words. Money stays in the Financial info section. Every fact is tied to a source we read, and where nothing about a candidate could be found, the profile says so instead of filling the space.
• LA Mayor homelessness timeline corrected. The court order pausing the federal suspension of the county homeless agency came in August, not June, and is on hold while the government’s appeal is heard.

September 7, 2026

• Updated weekly checks for full California coverage. Our automated checks on rosters, filings, and source freshness were built for 191 contests and now watch 1,140. Fixes are queued, freshness first.
• Weekly ballot check: The two candidates who are no longer running — one withdrew in Stockton, one died in Calaveras County — were re-confirmed and stay noted on their races.
• LA Mayor date fix. The congressional letter asking Mayor Bass to testify was sent September 2, not September 3.
• Screen readers now announce the coverage dots in the table above (complete, in progress, not started).

September 4, 2026

• Authoring is done — 1,140 of 1,141 known contests. The last holdout is the City Treasurer race in Williams, Colusa County. We spoke with the city clerk’s office by phone: one candidate qualified, so the seat is uncontested, but no public document names that person yet. We are leaving it unauthored on purpose, as a benchmark for how quickly the record catches up once ballots go out in a month.
• Reading levels adjusted for a smoother experience. We rewrote the whole corpus so the reading level scales with the depth you pick: Before today, contests read at a 14th grade level with fragmented grammar at all depth sizes. Now, Small lands at 7th grade, Medium at 8th, and Large at 11th.
• Many other small fixes.

September 3, 2026

• Coverage up to 99% — holy macaroni! We only authored 76 contests today but closed gaps for Chico, Delano, Placer County’s Board of Education, Redding, Fairfield, South Lake Tahoe, San Luis Obispo, Crescent City, Placerville, Roseville, Colfax, Eureka, Shasta County’s Board of Education, BART District 8, Napa, Lake, Mono, Monterey, Huntington Park, and West Covina.
• We also completed our sweep of financial data for candidates who reported them. 54 city and county races that shipped without fundraising data previously were checked against their city’s own disclosure portal. If their city didn’t have one, or a candidate only filed a short form, the section will say so. Remember: we automate a weekly check to keep this as fresh as possible.
• Fake news doesn’t rest and neither do we. Now we enter serious optimization mode while keeping an eye on updates about the most impactful races. As defined by 1) population density, 2) cultural impact, 3) federal moves and 4) local proximity. Regarding #4, this is a 1-woman-shop based out of Los Angeles.

September 2, 2026

• Coverage up to 92% today, from 79% yesterday — 1062 published contests, up from 917. The North Coast, the Sierra, and the Central Coast came online: Marin, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Yolo, Butte, Napa, Humboldt, Mendocino, Nevada, Siskiyou, Tehama, Shasta, Imperial, and San Benito counties, plus Supervisor and Board of Education runoffs in a dozen rural counties.
• We didn’t finish overnight. Yesterday we said we expected to. About 90 counted contests are still unbuilt, almost all because we can’t confirm a candidate roster from a real document — Chico, Delano, Placer County’s school board, and a few dozen small cities. Now doing a more manual pass with fresher eyes.

September 1, 2026

• LA mayor: new Recent News item. The Legislature passed a bill giving the mayor final say over the Forest Lawn Drive lane project that Raman planned and Bass paused. It now goes to the governor.
• Authoring continues: coverage up to 79% today, from 49% yesterday. Most of Monterey County’s city races are sourced and live now — Pacific Grove, Marina, Salinas, Greenfield, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Del Rey Oaks, Monterey, and King City — with a few seats honestly left undocumented pending a confirmed candidate roster yet.
• We expect to complete authoring of all California candidate ballots overnight. There’s still lots to do. Editing, refining, filling in gaps and tying up loose ends… Thank you for your patience.

August 31, 2026

• Published races went from 206 to 578 — coverage up from 18% to 49%. Every November city council and mayor race in San Diego, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties now has real candidates and sourcing, and Santa Clara County is underway.
• County-level races are authored in 14 more counties. Supervisor, Board of Education, and judge runoffs, plus one correction: Riverside’s “County Superintendent runoff” turned out to be a header-shift bug in the county’s own results PDF, corrected.

August 30, 2026

• We pulled hundreds more city council and mayor races. City-level races were our biggest gap — we now track every one of California’s 483 incorporated cities, up from 29.
• Candidate money now shows two time windows, not one. For over 100 races, you can see what a candidate raised before the June primary and what they’ve raised since, side by side — not just one combined total.

August 29, 2026

• We checked every California county for what’s actually on the ballot. All 58 counties are now enumerated against their own elections office’s real candidate list or certified primary results — up from 9 after the August 27 deadline for counties to publish certified candidate lists.
• Most county races were decided in June, not November. Offices like Supervisor, Assessor, and judge only go to a November runoff when nobody won a majority in the June primary.
• We caught and fixed two mistakes. Riverside’s real results added a County Superintendent race we’d missed. Glenn’s County Board of Education race is still unconfirmed, so it’s staying off the site until we find a real document, not a guess.

August 25, 2026

• Every contest now has one address, and search can reach it. Each race used to exist at two URLs: the one you read on your ballot, which search engines were told to ignore, and a plain reference copy that they indexed instead. Land here from a search now and you get the real page —voteorelse.com/2026/governor— with your full ballot one click away. Old links still work.
• You can see what we haven’t covered yet. The roadmap above lists every California county and city, what’s published in each, and what we still owe you — including the counties nobody has assessed yet. It’s generated from the site itself, so it can’t quietly drift from reality, and it says plainly where our own numbers are still incomplete.

August 22, 2026

• The homepage now opens straight into a ballot. Visiting the site lands you on a real, fully resolved demo ballot (a Los Angeles district) instead of an address form — and if this device has already looked up a ballot, you go straight back to yours. Entering your own address moved to its own page, one link away from the ballot header.
• The landing-page video is gone — and with it an accessibility failure. The old homepage autoplayed a 60-second looping video with no pause control, a known WCAG 2.2.2 failure we had accepted and documented. Removing it resolves that failure outright and drops a 6.5 MB download nobody asked for.
• San Diego and San Jose council runoffs are on the ballot. All four San Diego council runoffs (Districts 2, 4, 6 and 8) and all three San Jose runoffs (Districts 5, 7 and 9) — fourteen candidates, each with the same full write-up every other race gets, and district lookups verified against sitting councilmembers’ own districts. 214 contests total.

August 21, 2026

• San Francisco and Orange County local races are here — the first coverage beyond Los Angeles. San Francisco addresses now get their real local ballot: Assessor-Recorder, Public Defender, all five Board of Supervisors districts on this year’s ballot, and the Board of Education. Orange County’s District 5 supervisor runoff is in too. That’s nine new contests and 35 newly covered candidates, each researched to the same sourcing standard as everything else on the site — 207 contests total.
• San Francisco races now show the money and the June results. Every SF contest carries official campaign-finance figures from the Ethics Commission — totals, small-donor amounts, and public matching funds — including explicit notes for candidates with no committee or no filings yet. Races that had a June special election (Districts 2 and 4, the school board) also carry those certified results for context.
• Vote-for-three contests now work like the real ballot. SF’s school board elects three seats at once, so the picker now lets you select up to three candidates in contests that work that way — the first multi-seat contest the site has carried.
• Where nobody has covered a candidate, we say exactly that. A few qualified candidates have no press coverage, no campaign committee, and no public platform anywhere we could find. Their entries say so plainly — documented absence, not silence — and will deepen when the city’s official candidate statements publish.
• Corrected a hedge in the LA mayor race. We’d been saying nobody could confirm Bass blocked the Controller’s audit of Inside Safe — but our own sources already had both sides on the record. Fixed the paragraph, no new sources added.
• Added Bass and Raman’s first debate to Recent News. They clashed over Inside Safe’s cost and read dueling homelessness numbers into the record on August 19 — now in the LA mayor race’s news feed.
• Recent News now always shows, even on Small. A news item’s visibility used to depend on how it was authored; developments show at every size now, since they’re often the thing you most want to know.
• Privacy and Terms are now one Legal page. Same content, one effective date, less duplication — the old URLs redirect there. We also swapped the email contact for a text line: reach us at 858-218-6711 instead.

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.

August 12, 2026

• 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.

August 10, 2026

• 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.

August 8, 2026

• 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.

August 7, 2026

• 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.