Public work, publicly funded
Precincts.info is not a software product sold to county parties. It is a public works project: a reading layer over records the State of Ohio already publishes, given away, and paid for by the people who think it should exist. As an Ohio Benefit Corporation we are structured so that this stays true when it becomes inconvenient — the civic mission is in the charter, not in a values statement.
Four layers, and what we do with each
- The data is public. The Ohio Secretary of State publishes the statewide voter file. We add nothing to it the state didn't already release, and we hold no voter record you couldn't download yourself this afternoon.
- The code is public. MIT licensed, on GitHub. Run it, fork it, audit it, or carry it to another state. There is no version of this we hold back.
- The interpretation is public. This is the part nobody else gives away. The schema semantics, the per-county deviation ledger, the traps that make this file so much harder to read than it looks — all published, because that knowledge is the actual barrier and gating it is the actual harm.
- The field notes are private and local. What a captain learns at a door lives on their machine and belongs to them and their party. Never ours. Never pooled without consent. Never sold, to anyone, at any price.
Nobody pays for access to information. Not campaigns, not candidates, not county parties.
Then what costs money?
Running it. A repository nobody outside can operate is not a public service — it is a license. The recurring costs are real and unglamorous: refreshing every time the state drops a new voter file, hosting, and sitting down with a precinct captain who is not a programmer until she can generate her own briefing. That work is funded by patrons, by grants, and by cost recovery on bespoke analysis. It is not funded by charging for the thing that should be free.
What we won't become
The campaign technology industry has a structural interest in county parties never developing the ability to read their own voter file — a party that can do it in-house is a smaller account. We are trying to be the opposite of that, which means the test isn't whether you like us. It's whether you can leave. Export your field notes, run the pipeline yourself, fork the code and never speak to us again. If that ever stops being true, this page is a lie and you should hold us to it.