About BadgerBrief
BadgerBrief is an independent, non-partisan guide to Wisconsin’s 2026 elections. It exists to answer one question as plainly as possible: who is on your ballot, and what have they actually done?
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Independent, and unfunded
Funding
Self-funded — no advertising, sponsorships, donations, grants, or party/PAC money.
Affiliation
No party, campaign, PAC or advocacy group. Nobody has editorial input.
Endorsements
None, ever. Candidates are never rated, ranked or recommended.
Nothing on this site is paid for, and there is nobody to please. That is the whole reason it can be read the way it is written.
How the facts get here
Almost nothing here is typed in by hand. Ballots come from the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s official candidate list — the names are printed exactly as a voter sees them in the booth. Voting records are parsed directly from the Legislature’s own roll-call documents and the U.S. House Clerk’s records, and every one is reconciled against the totals the document itself publishes before it is stored. Campaign finance comes from the Wisconsin Ethics Commission and the FEC.
When a document cannot be reconciled, it is discarded rather than published — an incomplete record is worse than a missing one. The full methodology explains each source, how positions and quotes are reviewed before publication, and what the checks cannot catch.
Who makes it
BadgerBrief is built and maintained by Tarik Moody in Milwaukee, independently and in his own time.
In the interest of full disclosure: Tarik is Director of Strategy and Innovation at Radio Milwaukee, and an appointed commissioner of the Milwaukee City Plan Commission. Both are stated here on purpose. The Plan Commission is a city land-use body — it has no role in the state legislative, congressional, or statewide races this guide covers — and he has no involvement in any race on BadgerBrief. Every candidate is treated identically, by the same sourced method, with no endorsements. Neither role funds or directs this site.
This is not a news organisation and does not claim to be one. It is one person’s attempt to make public records legible, held to a simple rule: if a claim is on this site, its source is one click away, and if it turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected in public.
Open source, and a learning project
The code that runs BadgerBrief is open source and built with Claude Code. Anyone can read exactly how it works — how each source is pulled, checked, and shown on the page — and any developer who wants to improve it, or check the code for themselves, is welcome to.
It is also a learning project. Building it in the open is how Tarik is learning to work with data, databases, and APIs — so the guide gets better as the learning does, and the way it is made stays visible instead of hidden.
If something is wrong
Assembling records automatically means mistakes are possible, and the checks are arithmetic — they can confirm that a roll call adds up, not that it says what the Legislature meant. Readers are the last check, and reports are read by a person.