Ballot.fyi will collect the minimal amount of data about its users to provide good service, and we will never monetize this data. We do not host or display any advertisements, nor serve any trackers for any advertisement purpose. We do not store any personal information on any internal databases. As much as possible, we will respect and respond to your privacy requests.
In short, and in plain English, ballot.fyi does not explicitly use, transfer, sell, or monetize any collected personal information for any commercial purposes outside of ballot.fyi. To better understand our audience, the only means of passive data collection we employ is Google Analytics and Netlify Analytics, which collects service usage data. You can read their data policies here and here, respectively. The only place you can possibly volunteer any personal information is our form to subscribe to our email list, administered through Mailchimp. You can read their data retention policy here. We discuss our relationship with these third-party services in more depth below.
We do not advertise on this site, nor do we serve any cookies for advertising purposes.
We do not employ any user login system or payment integration. Thus, we do not store any passwords or tokens from other services with highly-sensitive information.
Ballot.fyi is a statically-generated site. With the exception of serving browser-specified prefences such as preferred language and font size, our service is largely the same across users.
Ballot.fyi is a personal project, 100% independently owned by Jimmy Chion, a person, and with the support of a team of volunteers. Ballot.fyi has no affiliation with any business entities, nor any current (or future) obligations or debts – implicit or explicit – to any persons or entities.
For full disclosure, from 2017 to 2018, ballot.fyi was a project under the business entity Amir & Erica, Inc. (DBA By The Bay), and funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a nonpartisan organization. Amir & Erica (a pun off “America”) was dissolved in 2019 due to lack of funding, and the rights to ballot.fyi were transferred back to Jimmy Chion.
Ballot.fyi's website respects the Do Not Track header supplied by modern browsers. We will detect the DNT header if your browser emits it, and ballot.fyi will not employ Google Analytics on the ballot.fyi domain for that session. If you would like to learn more about DNT, or would like to enable it, we recommend reading the Wikipedia article, and then referring to guides at allaboutdnt.com. To be clear, ballot.fyi does not affiliate with Wikipedia or allaboutdnt.com, nor do we guarantee that their information is accurate.
Ballot.fyi, through Google Analytics, serves cookies to track usage of our service. Here are all the cookies used by Google Analytics. The Google Analytics cookies (third party) served from the domain ballot.fyi are `_gat_gtag_UA_83939332_1`, `_gid`, and `_ga`. These have an expiration date of 1 day, 2 days, and 2 years, respectively from when they are served. As mentioned above, we will not serve cookies if the Do Not Track header indicates that websites should not track the session.
The only personal information we can collect from you is your email address, if you decide to sign up for our newsletter. We use this information for our email newsletter only.
We employ third-party providers to collect usage information for analytical purposes. The information collected and from whom are described in more detail below. We use this information to understand our audience so that we can improve our service.
Ballot.fyi, when permitted, will record service usage data for analytical purposes. The data is recorded by up to three providers, listed below. These are the only three third-party entities that can receive usage data about you from www.ballot.fyi. Below, we also describe some of the data these services collect from our shared users that are available to us. For full descriptions of the data each service provides to its customers, such as ballot.fyi, we encourage you to read their privacy policies or terms of services.
Netlify (www.netlify.com) is a website-hosting service and hosts www.ballot.fyi, 2018.ballot.fyi, and 2016.ballot.fyi. Netlify provides an optional service called Analytics for Netlify's customers to understand usage of that customer' website(s). Ballot.fyi has opted in to this feature to better understand its viewership. For those who are curious as to why there are two analytics providers, here's why. As the hosting service, Netlify Analytics has advantages over client-side analytics. You can read about the types of information collected by Netlify and viewable by ballot.fyi here. All information is deidentified. Netlify does not serve any cookies.
For more information: Netlify's Privacy Policy.
Mailchimp (www.mailchimp.com) is a service to manage email subscribers, email lists, and email campaigns. By nature of having at least one email list, ballot.fyi, must manage email addresses. Ballot.fyi does not store any email addresses (or any personal information from visitors) in any of the databases it owns. All email addresses are stored within Mailchimp. Some usage data is sent from Mailchimp to Google Analytics.
Within the boundaries of its privacy policy, Mailchimp will track data regarding email campaigns such as email opens and link clicks. Mailchimp does not serve any cookies on this site.
You may have been added to the email list if you have subscribed to a previous service of ballot.fyi at any point in the past, or if you subscribed to By The Bay, a similar and affiliated service to ballot.fyi in 2018. If you are a subscriber, you may unsubscribe immediately at any time.
For more information: Mailchimp's Privacy Policy.
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) provides rights to all California residents with respect to the data that a company holds about them. In fact, the changes proposed by Prop 24 of this year build on top of the CCPA. For example, you have the right, as a California resident, to know “what personal information [a company has] collected, used, shared, or sold about you”, and why they did so. Please read more about it here.
In essence, you have a right to know what personal information a company has collected on you, the right to delete that information, and the right to opt-out of any “sale” of that information. And finally, you have the right of and non-discrimination should you exercise any of these rights.
CCPA does not explicitly apply to ballot.fyi because we are not a for-profit company that makes more than $25 million a year. However, because our primary audience is made up for Californians, and to bring awareness to this new law, we will voluntarily comply with requests that fall under the CCPA.
For any questions, comments, or requests please email us at fax@ballot.fyi (via email).