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Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 16, 2026.

This Privacy Policy describes how CAIR Action ("CAIR Action," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, shares, and protects information when you visit or use the CAIR Action Guide website and any related tools or services we make available (the "Service"). This Policy is part of, and incorporated by reference into, our Terms of Service.

In short: we collect the minimum information needed to show you the candidates CAIR Action endorses on your ballot, to operate and improve the Service, and to plan CAIR Action's civic-outreach work. We do not sell your personal information. We retain the home addresses you submit for ballot lookup as part of our voter-outreach planning, as explained in Section 5 below.

1. Scope

This Policy applies to information collected through this website and through any related interfaces we operate. It does not apply to third-party websites, services, or organizations that we do not control, even if those services are linked from the Service or used to deliver part of the Service. Where third parties process your information on our behalf, their own privacy practices also apply.

2. Information We Collect

We collect information in three ways: information you provide directly, information generated automatically when you use the Service, and information we receive from third-party providers that help us operate the Service.

(a) Information you provide

  • Addresses you enter to look up endorsements on your ballot, including any address you confirm from autocomplete suggestions.
  • Account information when you sign in, including your name, email address, profile image, and authentication identifiers supplied by our identity provider.
  • Submissions you make through the Service, including ratings, comments, feedback, missing-race reports, corrections, and any free-text content you choose to send us.

(b) Information collected automatically

  • Page-view events, including the page you visited, a coarse referrer category, approximate viewport size, random browser and visit identifiers, and a coarse country/region derived in memory from your IP address at request time. A random browser identifier is kept in local storage to count returning browsers, including users who are not signed in. It is replaced on your next visit once it is 90 days old; you can remove it sooner by clearing this site's browser storage. A new visit begins after 30 minutes of inactivity. These analytics identifiers are independent of your sign-in session and are not generated from an IP address or browser fingerprint. Your IP address itself is not written to our database.
  • Address-lookup events, which record the address you submitted, the districts it resolved to, and the time of the lookup, so CAIR Action can plan civic-outreach work and improve the accuracy of the guide.
  • When you select Print / Save as PDF for your personalized guide, we retain a private copy of the guide, including the address shown, its endorsements, and print options, for quality checks. Copies are accessible only to authorized administrative staff. Preview opens and print requests are counted separately; a print request does not confirm that printing was completed.
  • Basic device and technical information, such as the user-agent string of your browser, used to detect automated traffic and to render the site correctly. We do not use device fingerprinting to identify you across other sites.
  • Error and performance diagnostics, including stack traces and timing data, used to detect and fix bugs.

(c) Information from third parties

  • Identity-verification metadata from our authentication provider (such as whether your email address has been verified).
  • Geocoding and electoral-district results returned by our address and districting providers in response to the addresses you submit.

3. How We Use Information

We use the information described above to:

  • Operate the Service, including matching your address to the correct electoral districts and showing you the endorsements that apply to your ballot;
  • Improve the Service by analyzing usage patterns in aggregate, identifying gaps in coverage (such as missing races or districts), and prioritizing future endorsement research;
  • Plan and conduct CAIR Action's non-partisan civic engagement and voter-outreach activities, including identifying geographies and communities where additional civic information would be helpful;
  • Respond to feedback, corrections, and support requests you send us;
  • Protect the Service from abuse, including detecting bots, rate-limiting suspicious traffic, and investigating violations of our Terms of Service;
  • Comply with applicable law, respond to lawful requests from public authorities, and enforce our rights and the rights of others.

We do not use your submitted address to target you with political advertising, and we do not enroll you in any mailing list as a result of using the address-lookup feature.

If you ask us to email your guide, we send your email address and the guide PDF to Resend for delivery. The PDF may include the address shown in your preview. We do not save an additional copy of the PDF for this email feature. If you separately check the optional newsletter and guide update subscription box, we save your email address, the consent wording, and when you opted in. You must confirm ownership through an email link before receiving campaigns. Leaving that box unchecked does not create or change a subscription. Use the preferences link in your confirmation email to cancel or unsubscribe without signing in. We retain an unsubscribed record to prevent further campaigns; subscribing again requires a new confirmation. You may request removal using the contact details in this Policy.

Area update emails are optional. After a lookup with no matching endorsements, or after you report a missing race, you may check an unchecked box to receive CAIR Action Guide updates about the searched area and any race types you reported. If you do, we link your email address to the address you submitted, its resolved districts, the race types you reported, the consent wording, the time you opted in, and an approximate city, region, and country derived from your IP address at signup. That approximate IP location is stored separately and is never treated as your electoral geography. We use this information only to tell you about guide coverage for that area; it is not a general newsletter, and you must confirm your email through a link before we send any updates. Access is limited to authorized administrative staff.

You can unsubscribe from an area interest at any time using the preferences link in its confirmation email or future update emails. We retain its signup context, consent history, and unsubscribed status to honor your choices and plan guide coverage for the relevant election cycles and a reasonable period afterward, subject to periodic retention review. A new signup does not lift suppression until you confirm again. You may ask us to delete your area update signup using the contact details in Section 14; deleting the signup does not delete unrelated missing-race reports or lookup records, which are handled as described in Section 5. We do not link historical lookup visitors to email addresses or infer consent from past activity.

4. Legal Bases for Processing (Where Applicable)

Where data-protection laws such as the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation apply, we process personal information on the following bases:

  • Your consent — for example, when you voluntarily submit an address or feedback.
  • Performance of a service you have requested — for example, when you sign in or use a feature that requires an account.
  • Our legitimate interests in operating, improving, and protecting the Service, in carrying out CAIR Action's civic mission, and in detecting and preventing abuse, provided those interests are not overridden by your rights and freedoms.
  • Compliance with legal obligations to which we are subject.

5. How Long We Keep Information

We retain information for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this Policy, and then we delete or de-identify it. Specific practices include:

  • Your IP address is used only in memory to derive a coarse country/region and is not written to our database.
  • Page-view events are automatically purged after 365 days.
  • Addresses you submit through the ballot-lookup and missing-race features are retained, together with the resolved district information and the time of the lookup, so that CAIR Action can plan its civic-engagement work. We may retain these records for the duration of the relevant election cycles and for a reasonable period afterward, and we may aggregate or de-identify them for longer-term analysis.
  • Account information is retained while your account is active and for a reasonable period afterward to honor recordkeeping and security requirements.
  • Feedback, ratings, and other Submissions are retained while we operate the Service so that we can act on them, publish them where appropriate, and audit our content-review process.

If you would prefer that your submitted address not be retained for outreach planning, you can contact us using the channel in Section 14 below and we will work with you to remove or de-identify records associated with your address, subject to operational and legal constraints.

6. How We Share Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with candidates, candidate committees, political action committees, political parties, or any of their vendors for the purpose of campaign communications or targeting.

We share information only in the following circumstances:

  • With service providers that operate parts of the Service on our behalf, including authentication, hosting, database storage, address autocomplete and geocoding, electoral-district matching, email delivery, error and performance monitoring, and analytics. Where we have a commercial relationship with a provider, we contractually limit them to using the information only to provide their service to us. Some providers we use are public or open-source services (such as the U.S. Census geocoder and our fallback open-source geocoding service) for which bilateral contractual terms are not available; for those providers we rely on their published terms and on minimizing the information we send.
  • Within CAIR Action and its affiliated entities, for the purposes of operating the Service and advancing CAIR Action's civic mission.
  • When we believe in good faith that disclosure is required by law, by a valid legal process, or by a request from a public authority, or is necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of CAIR Action, our users, or the public.
  • With your consent or at your direction, for example when you ask us to publish your name alongside a comment.
  • In aggregated or de-identified form that cannot reasonably be used to identify you, for research, reporting, fundraising, and educational purposes.
  • In connection with a merger, restructuring, asset transfer, or similar transaction, subject to confidentiality obligations and to this Policy.

7. Third-Party Services

The Service relies on the following categories of third-party providers, each of which may process limited information on our behalf:

  • Identity and authentication, used to let you sign in securely. This provider receives your email, password (handled by the provider, never by us), and authentication metadata.
  • Address autocomplete and geocoding providers, which receive the partial or full address text you type so that they can return suggestions and coordinates. We may fall back to a public open-source geocoding service when our primary provider is unavailable.
  • Public electoral-district services operated by the U.S. Census Bureau (the Census geocoder and, when it is unavailable, the Census TIGERweb service), which receive the coordinates derived from your address so that we can identify your federal, state, and local districts.
  • Cloud-hosting and database providers, which store the records described in this Policy on infrastructure we configure.
  • Error and performance monitoring providers, which receive technical diagnostics and limited contextual information when something goes wrong.
  • An IP-geolocation provider, used at request time to derive a coarse country/region for analytics. The provider receives your IP address; we do not store the IP address ourselves.
  • AI/LLM providers, used in limited internal workflows (such as parsing uploaded voter-guide PDFs). These providers receive only the content we explicitly send them and are configured to not train their models on our submissions where the provider supports that setting.

Each provider has its own privacy practices. We choose providers that, in our judgment, offer reasonable privacy and security protections, but we do not control them and are not responsible for their conduct.

8. Cookies and Similar Technologies

We use a small number of cookies, local-storage entries, and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember your preferences, secure the Service against cross-site request forgery, and measure traffic. We do not use third-party advertising cookies, behavioral-advertising trackers, or cross-site fingerprinting.

You can configure your browser to refuse cookies or to alert you when cookies are being sent, but some parts of the Service (in particular signing in) may not function correctly without them.

9. Security

We use commercially reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect the information we hold, including encryption in transit, role-based access controls, rate limiting, logging of certain administrative actions, and routine security review. No system is perfectly secure, however, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a security incident that affects your personal information, we will notify you as required by applicable law.

10. Your Choices and Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights under applicable privacy laws, including the right to:

  • Request access to the personal information we hold about you;
  • Request that we correct inaccurate or incomplete personal information;
  • Request deletion of personal information we hold about you, subject to legal and operational limits;
  • Request a copy of certain personal information in a portable format;
  • Object to or restrict certain processing, including processing based on our legitimate interests;
  • Withdraw a consent you have previously given, without affecting the lawfulness of processing that occurred before withdrawal;
  • Lodge a complaint with a data-protection authority in your jurisdiction.
  • opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, if applicable;
  • limit the use or disclosure of sensitive personal information, if applicable under state law; and
  • not to receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your privacy rights.

These rights are subject to important exceptions. For example, we may retain or decline to delete personal information where necessary to complete a transaction, maintain your account, provide requested services, comply with law, detect security incidents, prevent fraud, enforce our rights, exercise free speech, protect other users, or carry out internal uses reasonably aligned with your relationship with us and permitted by law.

You can exercise these rights by contacting us using the information in Section 14 below. We may need to verify your identity before acting on your request and may decline requests that are unreasonable, repetitive, or that we are legally required to refuse.

Some browsers transmit "Do Not Track" or Global Privacy Control signals. Because there is no industry consensus on how those signals should be interpreted, we do not currently respond to them in a way that is different from this Policy. We will update this section if and when our practice changes.

California Privacy Notice

If you are a California resident, this section applies to you in addition to the rest of this Privacy Policy.

Categories of Personal Information Collected

In the preceding 12 months, we may have collected the following categories of personal information: identifiers, such as name, email address, postal address, IP address, and account identifiers; personal information described in California Civil Code Section 1798.80; internet or other electronic network activity information; approximate geolocation data; professional or organizational information if you provide it; inferences drawn from your activity on the Website; and potentially sensitive personal information to the extent certain data may reveal political views, civic affiliations, or account credentials.

Purposes for Collection and Use

We collect and use personal information for the business and operational purposes described in this Privacy Policy, including account administration, platform functionality, endorsement communications, advocacy outreach, security, moderation, analytics, legal compliance, and protection of the Website and its users.

Retention

We retain personal information for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, taking into account the nature of the information, our operational needs, legal obligations, dispute resolution needs, security considerations, and the expectations of users.

11. Children

The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will take steps to delete that information.

12. International Users

The Service is operated from, and the information we collect is stored and processed in, the United States. If you access the Service from another country, you understand that your information will be transferred to, and processed in, the United States, where data-protection laws may differ from those in your country. By using the Service, you consent to that transfer.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the "Last updated" date above and, where appropriate, provide additional notice through the Service. Your continued use of the Service after the updated Policy takes effect constitutes your acceptance of the updated Policy.

14. Contact

Questions, comments, or requests about this Privacy Policy or about how we handle your information should be directed to CAIR Action at cairaction.org.

For the related terms that govern use of the Service, see our Terms of Service.