Data use & privacy

A separate, privacy-protected layer

Company activity and employee giving

The app offers Company/PAC, Employee giving, and Compare views. Employee giving is a grouped summary of federal contributions associated with a reported employer name. Company/PAC activity and employee giving stay separate and are never added into one political score.

The employee layer publishes no individual names, addresses, amounts, recipient histories, or exact contributor counts. A result requires at least 25 distinct reported contributors overall and 10 in each visible party group; the app shows only broad contributor-size buckets. Sparse groups remain unavailable.

Contribution records cannot establish voting habits, workforce opinions, current employment, or employment at a particular mapped branch. Employer information can be incomplete, and federal individual bulk data cover a subset of itemized contributions. See the FEC’s reporting guidance and file description.

Candidate and race pages

Federal candidates, races, and their money

Candidate and race pages cover federal House, Senate and presidential candidates registered with the FEC. Money figures come from FEC bulk data (the candidate master, committee master, candidate–committee linkage, all-candidates and current-campaign summary files, and contributions from committees to candidates) and from FEC-computed aggregates in the OpenFEC API: per-report totals, totals by contribution size, and itemized individual totals by state. Each page shows the coverage date of its figures. These are weekly snapshots, not live reporting; the FEC’s own page for each candidate is the authoritative source.

Individual contributors are never named. Individual money appears only as FEC-computed aggregates: the summary total, totals by contribution size, and totals by state. A state is listed among a candidate’s out-of-state sources only when at least 10 contributions make up its total. Contributions from PACs, party committees and other political committees are shown by committee name and amount; committee data is not restricted the way individual contributor data is (FEC Advisory Opinion 2004-24). There is no donor search, contributor list, or list of top individual donors.

Polling, published race ratings, candidate status (for example withdrawn or nominee) and results come from each race’s Wikipedia page, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, with a link to the page and the cited pollsters. TerraCivic does not rate, score, or grade candidates or races and does not compute its own polling average. When no polling is listed, the page says so.

Each candidate page carries the FEC no-solicitation notice below. A machine-readable list of candidate and race pages, keyed by FEC candidate ID, is published at /candidates/index.json; it contains no contributor information.

The Your candidates lookup finds a visitor’s state and congressional district in the browser using U.S. Census Bureau district boundaries and ZIP code centers. A typed street address is sent only to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to find its location; a ZIP code or device location is matched on the page. TerraCivic does not store the address, location, or results, and does not add them to the page address. A ZIP code or address typed into the site search, or the map’s search center sent with “Who’s on the ballot here”, is passed to the lookup inside the visitor’s browser for that one page load and then deleted. The site search itself runs in the browser over a list of candidate, race, state and company names; what a visitor types is not sent to TerraCivic. The homepage shows the races in the visitor’s state without asking: Netlify, which hosts the site, estimates the state from the connection and passes only its two-letter code into the page. TerraCivic does not see or store the IP address, and nothing about the visit is kept. A visitor can pick a different state; that choice is remembered only in their own browser. Where a state redrew its districts for the current election and the new lines have not been confirmed, the lookup lists every House race in that state instead of guessing.

Pages for current members of Congress show their voting record in the current Congress as counts and the record itself: how many roll-call votes they cast yea, nay or present, how many they did not vote on, their latest votes (each linked to the official House Clerk or Senate record), and the bills and resolutions they sponsored or cosponsored. Votes come from Voteview (cited as its authors ask), and bills from GovInfo’s Bill Status data (public domain). TerraCivic does not score, rate or rank members, and does not use Voteview’s ideology scores.

Governor candidates come from each state’s own campaign disclosure system, starting with the South Carolina State Ethics Commission. TerraCivic uses only the totals on each report (raised, spent and cash on hand by reporting period, and each report’s totals by type). It does not fetch, store or show any contributor or payee. Candidates are identified by the state’s filer ID, never by name alone. Where a state’s campaign finance site cannot be read automatically, its governor candidates, their status and any campaign money table come from the race’s Wikipedia page (CC BY-SA 4.0), which names the state source the figures were copied from; those pages say so, give the figures’ “as of” date, and link the state’s official records. South Carolina makes these reports “publicly accessible, searchable, and transferable” (S.C. Code § 8-13-365); S.C. Code § 30-2-50 bars using personal information from state records for commercial solicitation. No photo is shown for a governor candidate unless the state releases it for reuse. Where a state’s law bars any commercial use of its campaign filings (Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, South Dakota, Wyoming and Washington so far), TerraCivic does not present that state’s campaign money until a lawyer confirms it may, and links to the state’s own records instead.

For states whose records can be read in full, a state money page lists every state race and committee the state reports: candidates for statewide, legislative, judicial and local office, party committees, PACs and ballot-measure committees. In Texas, Illinois, California, Georgia, Vermont, Idaho, Massachusetts and South Carolina each figure is the committee’s own report totals, from the state’s bulk files or public data service, and committees are identified by the state’s filer ID; New York’s totals are summed by the state’s open data service itself. Connecticut, Oklahoma and Nebraska publish every receipt and expense as bulk files, and Florida lists committee receipts and expenses but totals only across all years: there TerraCivic adds up each committee’s lines for the two-year cycle as the file is read, keeping only the committee, date, type and amount; no contributor or payee is stored or shown. Florida’s, Tennessee’s and Kansas’s candidate totals come with no filer ID, so those candidates are identified by the name, office and district the state lists. Tennessee, Kansas and Rhode Island pages cover candidates only, from each report’s own summary.

State legislators lists the sitting members of all 50 state legislatures from Open States (public domain): name, chamber, district, party, and the official email, office phone, website and Wikipedia page Open States lists. Photos are not shown. The counties each district reaches, and the share of each county’s people who live in it, come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 state legislative district block files and 2020 census block populations. A member’s campaign money is shown only where TerraCivic reads that state’s campaign records and the state’s law allows it: it is the member’s own committee for the current cycle, matched on chamber, district and last name, and is left blank, never shown as $0, when no committee matches. The same data, one file per state, is published at /data/legislators/<ST>.json for other sites to use; every record names its source and when it was retrieved.

All the money adds up federal campaign money for each two-year cycle from the FEC’s committee summary file (every committee’s own report totals), the FEC’s totals of independent expenditures, electioneering communications and communication costs by candidate, and the IRS’s Form 8872 reports from 527 political organizations (report totals only). Money passed from one committee to another is counted once: the page lists every subtraction. Super PAC donors are named only when the donor is an organization or committee; people who give are counted in the totals and never named. State money is shown separately and never added to the federal total.

The legal boundary that informs this design

Research context, without individual-data targeting.

Federal law and regulation prohibit selling or using information copied from FEC reports to solicit contributions or for commercial purposes. TerraCivic’s product boundary excludes contributor solicitation, individual political targeting, donor prospecting, contributor-derived contact lists, identity-based lead generation, and contributor-derived marketing audiences. Do not use TerraCivic results for any of these purposes.

TerraCivic is an independent research and geographic-visualization product. Speaking to readers across political viewpoints does not use FEC-derived contributor information to construct or target an audience.

Services your device contacts

Maps, search, and location.

Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap. Address and place search use Photon (Komoot) and Nominatim (OpenStreetMap), and route directions use the OSRM demo service; the text you search for is sent to those services. Drawn-area and route searches send the area’s coordinates to public Overpass map-query servers. Your browser asks your permission before sharing your device location. If it cannot provide one, the app asks ipapi.co for an approximate area based on your network address. Google Maps loads only if you add your own API key in Settings.