Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 30, 2026

PolitiCal is in Public Beta. This page describes, in plain language, what actually happens to your information when you use PolitiCal today — not what we might build later. If that changes, we’ll update this page and the date above.

What you give us

Tarrant County Public Beta (the ballot lookup on our home page). When you enter a residential address there, PolitiCal matches it to a Tarrant County voting precinct in your browser, using published data files that are the same for every visitor. The address is processed in your browser. It is not sent to PolitiCal’s servers, Google Civic, or another third party as part of that lookup, and PolitiCal does not store it.

Retained legacy routes. Some earlier lookup routes and code remain in PolitiCal and are not the Public Beta front door — for example, the earlier lookup that sends an address to Google’s Civic Information API (see “Third-party services” below). The home page does not send addresses to them, and they may handle information differently until they are separately retired. The sections below that describe server-side handling apply only if one of those routes is used.

We don’t ask for your name, an account, or any other personal information to use PolitiCal — there are no accounts on PolitiCal at all.

Address handling

In the Tarrant County Public Beta lookup, your address is held only in your browser’s memory while the lookup runs. It is never placed in a web address (URL), request, cookie, browser storage, or log by PolitiCal’s code. The only thing your browser downloads is a published data file that is identical for every visitor.

In a retained legacy lookup route, your address is used to make the ballot lookup request to Google Civic and is not written to a database. PolitiCal does not keep a copy of the address, or of the lookup it produced, in a cache.

In a retained legacy route, if you use the calendar feature to add real election dates (registration deadline, early voting, Election Day), your address is also used briefly on our server to check whether it’s in an area we currently have real, published dates for. That check never sends your address to Google or anyone else, and nothing about it is stored.

Browser storage

The selections you make on a ballot, and any voting-location note you make there, are kept in your browser’s memory only while the page is open. PolitiCal does not save them to your browser’s local storage or session storage, so they are gone when you refresh or close the page. The address you enter in the Tarrant County Public Beta lookup is not written to browser storage either.

Earlier versions of PolitiCal did save ballot selections and voting-location choices in local storage. To make sure none are left behind, PolitiCal removes those specific saved items from your browser when you visit a PolitiCal page. It removes nothing else.

Server logs

PolitiCal’s own application code is deliberately built to never write your address into any log, error message, or record we control — including when a lookup fails, where we specifically checked that the failure message can’t leak your address.

Platform-level logging (Vercel)

PolitiCal is hosted on Vercel. Like most web hosting providers, Vercel automatically keeps short-term operational logs of requests to our servers — including the web address requested. In the Tarrant County Public Beta lookup, no request carries your address, so it is not in these logs. In a retained legacy lookup route, the web address requested can include the address you entered. This is Vercel’s own infrastructure logging, separate from and not controlled by PolitiCal’s own code. These logs are kept for a limited time — approximately one hour, on our current hosting plan — and are accessible only to people with administrative access to our Vercel account — never published, sold, or used for anything beyond running the service. We’re disclosing this because it’s true, not because we’re fully comfortable with it — if we find a way to reduce it further, we will.

Analytics

We do not use Google Analytics, Vercel Analytics, or any other analytics or tracking service. We don’t know how many times you’ve visited, what you clicked, or anything else about your behavior on the site beyond what’s described above.

Cookies

PolitiCal does not use cookies.

Third-party services

The residential address you enter for the Tarrant County Public Beta ballot lookup is processed in your browser; it is not sent to PolitiCal’s servers, Google Civic, or another third party as part of that lookup. PolitiCal’s retained legacy lookup routes are not the Public Beta front door and may handle information differently: the Google Civic Information API is the third-party service they send an address to, only to answer that lookup. Like any website, PolitiCal is hosted by a provider (Vercel, described above), and your browser contacts our servers to load pages and published data files. Google’s handling of a legacy lookup request is governed by Google’s own privacy policy, not ours — we encourage you to read it. We do not currently use any other election-data provider.

Calendar

“Add Voting Plan to Calendar” builds your calendar entry on your own device from the choices you made: your chosen voting day and location and your ballot selections. It does not include the address you looked up. Your plan is not sent to or kept by PolitiCal’s servers, and we do not sell or share it. On Chrome for iPhone, a brief hand-off page opens first. It carries your plan only in the part of the web address after the “#”, which browsers do not include in requests to PolitiCal’s servers, and it removes that part as soon as the page loads.

When you choose to add your plan to a calendar, the calendar or account you pick (for example iCloud, Google or Exchange) may store or sync that entry under its own settings.

“Add Dates to Calendar” adds only the statewide election dates, which are the same for every visitor and don’t depend on your address. If you choose Google Calendar, the event details for the public election dates you select are sent to Google. In a retained legacy route, adding address-based election dates does briefly involve our server, as described above under “Address handling,” but the calendar file itself is generated and sent straight to you.

Contact

Questions about this policy: hello@usepolitical.com. That’s a real inbox we read — there’s no contact form, so nothing you send there passes through any system beyond email.

Beta status

PolitiCal is in Public Beta. The service, and this policy, may change as we learn — we’ll update the date at the top when they do.

Your rights

Because we don’t retain your address or any other personal information on our servers, there’s nothing stored for you to request, correct, or delete from us. If you have questions or concerns about how your information was handled, contact us at hello@usepolitical.com and we’ll respond honestly.

Children’s privacy

PolitiCal isn’t directed at children, doesn’t ask anyone’s age, and isn’t knowingly used to collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we’ll address it.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page whenever what we actually do changes, and update the date at the top when we do.