Methodology

Where every number comes from

No figure appears on this site without a source document in the registry. The registry renders at Sources, and every data table carries its own source line naming the document it rests on.

Every document is archived locally at the moment of citation, with the retrieval date recorded, because municipal PDFs move and get revised in place. Primary documents beat reporting: where a number exists only in news coverage, the site says so or leaves it out. Certified election figures were transcribed by eye from the certificates (several PDFs have no usable text layer) and re-checked against the document before publication.

Unknown is not zero

A figure that was not published renders as "not available". It is never shown as 0 and never silently omitted.

The site does not derive what it cannot source. Ballots cast are never computed from turnout multiplied by electorate; a levy share is never computed from an incomplete year; a capital figure with an unknown basis gets a null and a note rather than a guess. One deliberate exception runs in the safe direction and is labelled on the page where it happens: the 2022 electorate, derived from the certificate's own count and percentage.

Comparability

Budget line items get renamed between years, so any multi-year series carries mapping notes saying how each year's printed label was assigned. A "project cost" can mean total cost, city share, or construction only; every capital figure carries its basis.

Different definitions are different series. The City and the County count encampments differently, and the two counts never share an axis. The same applies to city versus CMA population figures, and to permits versus starts versus completions. A methodology change draws a series break on the chart, because a methodology change looks exactly like a real trend.

Elections data

The results archive covers 2003–2022. Every year except 2003 is transcribed from the certified declaration; 2003 comes from an unofficial source, is marked as such, and is excluded from derived figures.

People are matched across elections by a hand-maintained registry rather than by name-matching, with every merge recorded and checkable. Incumbency is derived from the certificates rather than from who is well known.

Candidates

The candidate list is transcribed from the City's published list, with the transcription date shown. Until the Clerk certifies the list on August 24, nothing on it is final, and single-candidate races are not called acclamations. A candidate who has not filed is never described as not running.

The questionnaire

Before any responses are published, this page will state the rules in full: who received the questionnaire, when, and at what addresses; the equal-treatment rules (the same questions for every candidate in a race, verbatim publication, the same word cap for everyone); and how non-response is displayed. The rules go up before the answers so they cannot be shaped by them.

Council votes: selection criteria

Only recorded votes can be shown, and much of council's business passes on consent without one. Before any vote appears on the site, this page will publish the rule for which votes are selected, so absence from the table cannot be read as absence of a position.

Who runs this site, and corrections

The About page discloses who runs the site, how it is funded, and its independence rules. Errors are corrected on the page where they appear, and every correction is logged in full at Corrections: what was wrong, what it says now, when it changed, and who flagged it. Nothing is silently edited.