Words & Deeds

Terms of Use

What Words & Deeds is

Words & Deeds is a nonpartisan directory of elected and appointed officials — federal, state, and (as coverage expands) local — paired with what those officials have actually said and done: primary-source legislative records synced directly from Congress.gov and senate.gov, and community-submitted content (statements, votes, actions) that links back to a real, verifiable source. We do not write commentary, endorse candidates, or characterize anyone's record for you. Where we show our own data (an official's photo, office, party, biography), it is sourced from public records and official government sites, cross-checked before publishing, and corrected promptly if you tell us it's wrong.

No accounts yet

As of this writing, the site has no user accounts, logins, or passwords. Anyone can submit content or use the address-lookup tool without identifying themselves to us.

Submitting content

If you submit a source link through "+ Submit Content," you're representing that the link is real, that the excerpt or headline you provide fairly describes it, and that you have the right to share it. Every submission is checked — either by an automated filter or a human moderator — before it appears on the site; we can reject or remove anything that's spam, abusive, sourced dishonestly, or otherwise against these Terms, at our discretion, at any time.

Accuracy and corrections

We source data directly from primary government records wherever one exists (Congress.gov, senate.gov, whitehouse.gov, state government sites) and from reputable secondary sources (e.g. Ballotpedia, the FEC) where it doesn't. Mistakes happen — office turnover, a mis-sourced record, a stale photo. If you spot one, we want to know; we correct real errors, we don't argue records into looking better for one side or the other.

What you can't do

• Submit false, defamatory, or deliberately misleading content, or misrepresent its source
• Attempt to disrupt, scrape at scale, or interfere with the site's normal operation
• Use the site to harass, threaten, or dox any person, official or otherwise
• Submit content on behalf of an official or candidate without disclosing that connection

No warranty

The site is provided as-is. Government data changes (a bill's status, an official's term, a vote's final tally can all update after the fact), and while we sync regularly, we can't guarantee the site reflects the very latest state of any record at every moment. Links to outside sources (Congress.gov, official government sites, submitted content) take you off this site to a page we don't control.

Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms as the site adds features (accounts, comments, voting, and other capabilities described in our public development roadmap are all still being built). We'll update the date at the top when we do.

Privacy Policy

The short version

As of this writing, Words & Deeds has no user accounts, does not use advertising or analytics cookies, and does not knowingly collect or store anything that identifies you personally. This page describes exactly what the site does today — not what it might do once features already on our public roadmap (accounts, community voting, analytics) are built, at which point this policy will be updated to match before any of that goes live.

The address lookup ("Find My Representatives")

When you enter an address to find your elected officials, that address is sent to a geocoding service (the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder, or Geocodio for the handful of states where district maps were recently redrawn) solely to match it to your voting districts — it is not stored on our servers or tied to any identity. Up to 8 recent addresses may be saved for your convenience directly in your own browser's local storage, never transmitted to us or to any third party; you can remove any of them yourself, or clear them by clearing your browser's site data.

Submitted content

Content you submit through "+ Submit Content" (a source link, a suggested headline, your notes) is stored so it can be reviewed and, if approved, published. We do not currently require or collect any identifying information from you to submit content — no name, no email, no account.

What we don't currently do

• No cookies or tracking scripts for advertising or analytics
• No IP address logging or device fingerprinting
• No accounts, so no passwords or personal profiles exist to protect or lose

Do we sell your data?

We do not sell personally identifiable information. As the site grows, we may share or sell aggregated, de-identified data — statistics that cannot be used to identify you — as part of how the site sustains itself; the raw, individual data behind any such aggregate is never included in that sale. If and when this begins, California, Colorado, Virginia, and similar state privacy laws give you the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information and to have your browser's Global Privacy Control signal honored automatically; we will provide a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" mechanism here before any data sale of any kind begins, not after.

Government and public-record data

The official/candidate data on this site (names, offices, party, photos, biographies, legislative and voting records) is sourced from public government records and reputable public directories — it describes public figures acting in their public capacity, not private individuals, and is not "your" data in any privacy sense.

Changes to this policy

If we add accounts, analytics, or advertising — all currently unbuilt, tracked items on our public development roadmap — this policy will be rewritten to disclose exactly what's newly collected and why, before that feature goes live, not after.