Updates
What changed, what’s available, and what we’re building next.
Merged changes
Changes a visitor would notice, starting September 22, 2026, newest first in merge order. Availability and remaining setup are described in each entry. Changes to data loaded from reviewed files are not listed here yet. Figures come from the change’s record and carry their measurement date.
The longest pages fold, and the election dates page can lead with a chosen state
On a phone, the data page went from 24,428 px tall to 6,157 px, the bills page from 17,162 px to 5,883 px, and the election dates page from 13,161 px to 1,523 px. Each source, older entry and state now sits behind one line you can open; every sentence is still on the page.
The election dates page can lead with a chosen state: with for=tx in the address, Texas's block starts 557 px down the 812 px screen, so it is visible without scrolling.
Where a state's mail-ballot deadline is a receipt date for ballots postmarked by a day, the page now says "received by that date if postmarked by the named day" instead of a bare "must arrive by".
Figures measured October 12, 2026.
Berrien County, Georgia's tax commissioner corrected
Berrien County, GA: tax commissioner corrected from the county's own page, read 2026-10-11. The county's page now lists Catherine Barnes as Interim Tax Commissioner, and that is what the official's page serves.
We found it by re-reading the pages we cite and noticing this one had changed; the new name was checked word for word against the page before anything was written.
Figures measured October 11, 2026.
Georgia and Illinois officers added from their own pages
Our reader added 44 county officer rows in 40 counties, each confirmed word for word against the county's own page. The coverage page now counts 588 of 3,144 counties read from their own page, where 167,550,912 residents live; before this it counted 554 counties and 166,427,830 residents.
Georgia now counts 62 of 159 counties read from their own page, where 7,419,164 of its 10,940,407 residents live.
We also corrected two more names in Pennsylvania, so the correction now covers the names of 48 county officers, each in the form the county's own page prints.
Figures measured October 11, 2026.
County officers spelled as their own pages print them
We corrected the names of 47 county officers in Pennsylvania and Georgia to the form each county's own page prints. A statewide directory had spelled them differently, with or without a middle initial; each name now matches the page we cite for it.
Pages for the corrected names moved to an address that matches the new spelling.
Figures measured October 10, 2026.
More counties read from their own pages
We added the county officer rosters our reviewers had already read from 209 more counties' own pages: in Pennsylvania, Washington, North Carolina, Georgia, Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Arizona.
The coverage page now counts 543 counties of 3,144 counties read from the county's own page, where 159,523,199 residents live. This morning it counted 334 counties and 101,503,468 residents. Counted on 2026-10-10 at 10:30 UTC.
We also added local contests for Travis, Harris and Bexar counties, ballot measures for Indiana, Missouri and Minnesota, school boards in several large districts, election-day rules for Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Florida and New York, and the new congressional maps for Ohio and Florida. San Antonio's boards now link to the city's own pages.
Coverage varies by place; where we have not read a county, the coverage page says so.
Figures measured October 10, 2026.
More reliable recovery and clearer personal exports
We repaired location and voting-plan recovery and sign-in session coordination.
Meeting pages now offer recovery when requests stall or return unreadable answers. Downloaded calendar entries preserve known times and source links, keep stable event identifiers, and avoid inventing end times.
You can download your guest session's civic record as CSV or print it without an account. Queue images retain complete ordinary descriptions, identify Rallybase.org, and state how many items were omitted when an export is too large.
Account and records launch preparations
Prepared records drafts with five sourced agency destinations or routing instructions, electronic-response preferences, and separate sending and agency-receipt tracking. Desktop drafts and tracking controls use side-by-side sections; phone controls remain readable. New account and records features remain behind their setup, testing and legal release checks. An API startup failure caught during release verification was repaired before the final live checks passed.
Figures measured October 1, 2026.
Easier ballot planning and more room for desktop readers
Calendar and Near you now use side-by-side sections on desktop. On phones, Bills keeps optional filters behind More filters, briefs offer section shortcuts, and the ballot planner has a compact section navigation. Long write-in names wrap on the worksheet and shared plan. Printing leaves out the surrounding planner content while keeping the worksheet, its disclaimer and sourced polling rules.
Report bugs and suggest improvements from the page you are reading
Most pages now have a Tell us control for reporting bugs, incorrect information or ideas. It opens a draft in your email app with a safe page path and the site version, so you can describe what happened before sending. Your searches, ZIP and private sharing keys stay out of the draft. The control supports keyboard navigation and hides during ballot planning and modal forms.
The support, sponsor and about pages stop inviting payments we cannot take
While we cannot take payments, the support, sponsor and about pages no longer invite a gift or a sponsorship. The sentences that did, including their opening lines and the sponsor page's line saying that payment starts an application, were rewritten.
The data page counts what we hold instead of stating it by hand
The figures on our data page, about which officials, bodies and meetings you can write to, were written by hand and had fallen out of date. They are now counted from our database, with the time each was counted shown beside it.
Several sentences there were corrected on the way: school-board contacts we hold are for superintendents, not board members; where we have never read a contact field or an address, the page now says so instead of saying none is published; and a statewide directory page is no longer described as a county's own site. This updates page was added in the same change.
The letter preview is captioned as your letter, and support says postage is not open
The preview beside the letter composer was captioned as what gets mailed, although we do not mail letters yet. It is now captioned as your letter.
The support page now says that printing and postage are not open yet.
The front page claims only what our data supports
Four sentences on the front page that our data could not support were removed or rebuilt on a count, among them claims about petitions and verified organizations.
The /discover and /happening pages now name what they cover, the sign-up panel no longer mentions petitions, and overstated lines on /welcome and /letters were corrected.
Figures measured September 26, 2026.
The ballot planner stops overstating who holds an office
Candidate lists now say a person is an incumbent according to the FEC, instead of saying they currently hold this office, which was false for incumbents running in a district other than their own.
A sentence about primaries that could mislead was replaced by the list's source, the day we read it, and a plain warning that the list is not narrowed by any primary result. Measures now sort in number order, and the planner starts with a ZIP code field.
Ballot lookup says when we last checked for a published ballot
When the official ballot for your address has not been published yet, the lookup now says so, with the day we last asked, in your own time zone.
The Texas general election page adds that when we last asked, no ballot had been published for any of the 6 Texas addresses we check.
Figures measured September 25, 2026.
Official pages lead with name, office and district, and old addresses redirect
Every official page we publish now leads with the person's name, office and district, with the date we read it above the facts. School officials link to their school district's page.
Correction, 2026-10-03: this entry first said every official page also shows its source above the facts. That was wrong. Pages for county officers and school officials link to the roster their record was read from. Pages for state legislators, governors and members of Congress show the date we read the record and no roster link, because those records store no roster address.
The 3,424 honorific page addresses, those beginning with Mr or Dr, moved to addresses without the honorific, and each old address redirects to the new address.
Figures measured September 25, 2026.
Local bill pages name their number and whose record they are
The 3,014 local bill and appointment pages we publish now carry the bill number in their title and first line. Each names the council, court or board whose record it is, or says the legislation portal where that could not be established, quotes the source's own title, and links the item's own page at the source.
Figures measured September 25, 2026.
Registration and polling-place details for five states, from each state
The Elections tab for Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and California now shows the registration deadline, the registration link, the polling-place lookup, and early voting or the mail route, each quoted from the state's own election authority with the date we read it.
Ohio's election site refused every request we made, so its card says we could not read it and links the state's own pages. These notes stop after election day.
Figures measured September 25, 2026.
The map names your county from our own county boundaries
Clicking the map or entering a ZIP code now names your county from our own county boundaries. A slow answer can no longer overwrite a newer choice you made, and a county code that belongs to another state is refused.
Checked after the release, an Austin ZIP code named Travis County and a Columbus ZIP code named Franklin County, each marked as a county.
Changes to how Ask reads meeting times, bill numbers and places
We changed Ask so that it gives a meeting's time in the time zone of the body that holds it, reads a House bill number with no Congress named as the current Congress's bill, answers questions about how voting works for the place a question names, opens its early-voting answers neutrally, and finds your senators from your own location.
These changes were tested against a stand-in for the AI model, not against the live site.
The note on congressional maps covers nine states
The note on congressional district maps now carries the facts for nine states, including new wording for Alabama, and the brief shows that note to readers in Alabama, Ohio and Florida, in each state's own words.
An old line written for Texas alone and an outdated council link were removed.
Figures measured September 25, 2026.
Search stops listing Senate candidates where no Senate seat is on the ballot
Search listed U.S. Senate filers in 15 jurisdictions that have no 2026 Senate election, each linking into the ballot planner. It now lists none there, and the planner refuses a Senate choice in those places.
Measured after the release, none of those 15 jurisdictions showed Senate results, and the 35 states that do have a Senate race kept theirs.
Figures measured September 25, 2026.
The district card stops showing another county's agenda items
County cards no longer show agenda items read from another government's legislation portal, and a card takes its state from the county itself rather than from a ZIP code remembered earlier.
The national card now says that elections are run by the states, instead of saying there are none. The race line counts the contests at your point, or says the race is statewide, and a seat with no member in our source says exactly that instead of calling the seat vacant.
You can mark ballot measures in the ballot's own words
Where we hold a measure's ballot wording, your voting plan now lets you mark it for or against in those words, or note that you looked at it and have not decided.
Each measure cites where its words came from. Statewide measures can be marked without entering a location, and each measure stays folded under its heading until you open it, which makes a long list of measures much shorter to scroll. Measured on the day of release, California's statewide layer held 14 measures, each with the source of its words.
Figures measured September 24, 2026.
Alaska's election pages stop implying their list of measures is complete
Alaska's county election pages listed the ballot measures we hold as if that were the whole ballot. They now say that the Division of Elections' sample ballots also print Ballot Measure No. 3, which we did not hold yet.
Figures measured September 22, 2026.