Data and Methodology

Primary sources, shown work. Nothing on this site is licensed from a data vendor — every number traces to an official public source, and every vote total names the geography it covers.

Campaign money — Federal Election Commission

The money sections run on a continuously synced pipeline against the FEC’s public API: candidates, committees, totals, itemized contributions, disbursements, and independent expenditures. Data refreshes on a five-minute cycle for itemized records and several times daily for candidate rosters, with each page noting its filings-through date. FEC data itself is free — your tax dollars already paid for it; we pay to make it legible.

Election results — Tennessee Secretary of State

Vote totals come from the Tennessee Secretary of State’s election results dashboards, ingested on a schedule (every ten minutes around election days, daily otherwise) with per-row provenance: the source page, when we read it, and whether the total is election-night unofficial or certified. Unofficial totals are treated as unofficial until the state certifies.

The state publishes five categories — congressional, governor, general assembly, judicial, and state executive committee — and we ingest all five, including the appellate retention questions, which are a different kind of ballot question and are stored as such. Every run compares what the source published against what we stored and reports anything it could not parse, so a race we are missing shows up as a gap rather than as silence. Each race’s own per-county breakdown is ingested too, which is how a county page can show how that county voted rather than only a statewide total.

County offices & ballot measures — each county’s own commission

County commission, mayor, sheriff, trustee, clerk, register, assessor, school boards, municipal offices and local ballot measures are not published by the state at all. Each of Tennessee’s 95 county election commissions reports its own, in whatever format it chose, so each one needs its own reader. Shelby County publishes through a vendor with a public data feed and is ingested; the rest are being worked through one at a time.

Where a county has not been ingested yet, its page shows nothing for these offices rather than showing zero — a county with no data is not a county that held no elections, and we would rather be visibly incomplete than quietly wrong. Vote totals here are the county’s own reporting, unofficial until it certifies; we publish the numbers, we do not compute them.

Districts & geography — official state sources and the Census

District boundaries were built from Tennessee’s official redistricting sources — by hand, through the 2026 mid-decade redistricting — and verified county-by-county against the Comptroller’s adopted maps. County geometry comes from the U.S. Census Bureau (TIGER). ZIP-to-county suggestions use the Census 2020 ZCTA-to-county relationship files, covering all fifty states and DC; a ZIP only ever suggests — members confirm their own county. Counties are stored with their official federal (FIPS) identifiers so joins and statistics are exact.

Registration & turnout denominators

Registered-voter counts come from the Tennessee Secretary of State’s published county registration files (currently the June 2026 release, named on the pages that use it). Turnout percentages divide official ballots cast by those denominators — both numbers visible, nothing interpolated.

Events — Mobilize

County organizing calendars list public events from the Mobilize API, filtered to the county and refreshed every fifteen minutes. Events belong to their organizers; we link out.

Corrections

If a number looks wrong, it matters to us: support@thedems.org. Every derived figure can be traced to its source row, and we publish corrections rather than quietly editing.

Last updated August 12, 2026.