Seattle Elections Guide

An auditable publishing pipeline for comparing endorsements in elections that appear on Seattle ballots. The immediate release target is the August 4, 2026 Washington primary.

This project is an endorsement aggregation, not an official voter pamphlet and not an independent evaluation of every candidate. Accuracy, provenance, and explicit uncertainty take priority over coverage.

Status

The authoritative August 2026 Seattle ballot inventory is implemented and validated. The default source panel is frozen before scoring, with 48 proposed organizations assigned explicit discovery and panel statuses. Content-addressed local evidence capture, integrity verification, unavailable-source records, structured manual transcription, deterministic race-scoped normalization, append-only ambiguity review, and immutable source-adapter refreshes are implemented. No recommendation is treated as complete coverage. The audited primary ledger contains 521 decisions from 41 represented source publications; release status explicitly lists the two remaining active sources with access or discovery constraints. Exact deterministic consensus scoring, coverage signals, audit-only grade and tie handling, comparison-only Seattle Times results, and the unresolved-review publication gate are also implemented. Responsive HTML and the two-page US Letter guide now present candidate-centric endorsement consensus without voter-facing letter grades, while retaining the complete source matrix and scoring artifacts for audit. Public guides are composed into a manifest-backed archive under stable /e/<election-id>/ routes; the bare domain temporarily redirects to the explicitly declared current election. A site-wide /about/ page explains the methodology, source-panel versioning, and correction path in plain language for voters, with reciprocal navigation to and from every guide. See PROJECT.md for the product specification, DECISIONS.md for the launch contract, docs/ELECTION_INITIALIZATION.md for starting future elections, docs/BALLOT_INVENTORY.md for inventory scope and reproduction, docs/SOURCE_DISCOVERY.md for the source panel, docs/SOURCE_PANEL_EXPANSION_2026-07-23.md for the six-source evaluation and deterministic scoring impact, docs/EVIDENCE_CAPTURE.md for evidence handling, docs/COLLECTION.md for automated source refreshes, docs/NORMALIZATION.md for matching and review, docs/SCORING.md for consensus semantics, and docs/PUBLICATION_EXPORTS.md for canonical exports and the shared publication view model, and docs/RENDERING.md for HTML/PDF generation and visual inspection. docs/RELEASE.md documents final audit and versioned GitHub Release publication, and docs/HOSTING.md documents automatic Cloudflare Pages deployment with Wrangler. Deterministic JSON and CSV exports, provenance and build manifests, the complete source matrix, and the single renderer-facing view model are implemented.

Development

Requirements:

• Python 3.12 or newer
• uv
• Chrome or Chromium
• Poppler's pdftoppm
• Node.js 24 and npm for local Cloudflare Pages preview or deployment

Install the locked environment and run the checks:

uv sync --frozen
uv run election-guide --help
uv run election-guide election init --help
uv run election-guide inventory import-initialized --help
uv run election-guide inventory validate
uv run election-guide sources validate
uv run election-guide sources report
uv run election-guide evidence --help
uv run election-guide evidence verify --help
uv run election-guide collect refresh --help
uv run election-guide normalize --help
uv run election-guide review --help
uv run election-guide score --help
uv run election-guide export build --help
uv run election-guide render build --help
uv run election-guide release verify data/releases/wa-2026-primary/source-decisions.yaml
uv run election-guide release build --help
uv run election-guide hosting stage --help
uv run ruff format --check .
uv run ruff check .
uv run pyright
uv run pytest

The Makefile provides the same common entry points:

make sync
make check

Repository policy

Source metadata, permitted evidence excerpts, normalized records, review decisions, and provenance manifests belong in Git. Full copyrighted or access-controlled source captures do not. See SOURCE_POLICY.md and data/README.md.

License

Code and original documentation are licensed under the MIT License. Third-party election and endorsement material retains its original ownership and is not relicensed by this repository.