What this site puts on your device
Nothing. Political Grades sets no cookies and writes nothing to local storage. It loads no analytics script, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, no social widget, no external fonts and no embedded video. There is no third-party JavaScript on any page of this site, which means there is no company other than the host that learns you were here.
You do not have to take that on faith, and you should not. Open your browser’s developer tools, load any page here, and look at the network tab. Everything comes from this domain.
There is also no consent banner, and that is not an oversight. There is nothing here to consent to. A banner asking permission to do nothing would be theatre.
What the host counts — and the part that is not nothing
This site is hosted on Netlify, and on 2 August 2026 its server-side Web Analytics was switched on. It runs entirely in Netlify’s logs — there is no code added to the page — and in Netlify’s words site activity is “tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying information.”
Here is the honest caveat that sentence leaves out. Like every web server, Netlify’s sees the IP address of each request, because it cannot send you a page without one — and it counts unique visitors by distinguishing those addresses within a single day. Under the GDPR an IP address can be personal data. So the accurate claim is not “nothing about you is processed.” It is: your address is used to count you, and it is not shown to us.
What actually reaches this project is a dashboard of totals:
- how many pages were served, per day
- how many distinct visitors that represents, per day
- which pages were the most read
- which countries the requests came from
- which sites linked here, and which addresses returned 404
On the plan this site is on, that dashboard is a rolling seven-day window. There is no way to click into a row, no individual visitor, no session replay, no cross-site tracking, no profile, and no ability to follow one reader from one page to the next. Nothing here is sold, shared or fed to an advertiser, because there is no advertising on this site and never will be — see how this is funded.
Netlify processes this data as the host. Their handling is governed by Netlify’s privacy policy, which is theirs and not ours.
Why measure at all
Because the alternative is deciding by vibe. Without a count there is no way to tell nobody read it from nobody could find it, and those call for opposite responses. A public-accountability site that cannot tell whether it reaches anyone eventually stops being maintained, which is the most common way projects like this one end.
Server-side counting was chosen precisely because it is the least invasive option that answers the question: it needs no script, sets no cookie, and cannot follow you anywhere.
Links that leave this site
The share buttons are ordinary links, not embedded widgets — they do not load anything from those companies and report nothing to them while you are here. If you click one, you are handed to that company and their rules apply, not ours. The same goes for every Source: link: those go to the government agency or journal that published the number, and once you are there you are their visitor.
If you email us
Writing to challenge@politicalgrades.com means we have your email address and whatever you put in the message. It is forwarded to an ordinary commercial email account — which therefore sees it — and read by one person. It is kept while the matter is open and while any correction it produces stands in the corrections log, because a correction has to remain traceable to what prompted it. It is not added to any list, and there is no newsletter to be added to.
If you would rather not be identifiable, say so in the message and any published correction will describe the dispute without naming who raised it. The substance is what matters; the sender is not the point.
The people on this site
One asymmetry is worth stating plainly, because it would be strange to write a privacy page and skip it. This site holds far more information about the officials it grades than about anyone reading it — their votes, their spending, their attendance, their states’ outcomes. All of it comes from public government records, published by the government, about the conduct of public office. That is the distinction the whole project rests on: public power gets scrutiny; private readers do not.
If you are graded here and believe a number about you is wrong, the dispute route is the same one everyone else uses, and it is on the about page.
Changes to this page
If what is measured here ever changes, the change is dated in the changelog like every other change, and the date under the headline above moves with it. A privacy policy that can be quietly rewritten is not a commitment; a dated one can at least be held to its own record.
If you want to know what is held about you, the answer is on this page — but ask anyway at challenge@politicalgrades.com and you will get a straight answer. This site is run by one person and is not staffed by lawyers; what it can offer instead is that everything it does is small enough to describe in full, and this page is the description.