BadgerBrief

Methodology

BadgerBrief is a non-partisan, source-linked Wisconsin voter guide. This page explains how information gets onto the site and how we keep it honest.

Non-partisan policy

BadgerBrief never endorses, ranks, or recommends candidates or parties. Candidate positions are presented descriptively, in the candidate's own words or as attributed by the cited source. Our assistant is instructed to refuse endorsement requests and legal advice, and those refusals are among the behaviors we test continuously (see “Quality checks” below).

Where the data comes from

  • Voting logistics (registration, absentee, early voting, voter ID, polling hours): Wisconsin Elections Commission and MyVote Wisconsin, which is always the authoritative system for taking action.
  • Races and candidates: official filings and public reference sources (Ballotpedia, candidate campaign sites, Wisconsin news outlets), each linked from the page where it's used.
  • Campaign finance: the FEC API for federal offices and the Wisconsin Ethics Commission's Sunshine database for state offices, used for non-commercial voter education only, per Wis. Stat. § 11.1304(12).
  • Political advertising: public ad archives and FCC public inspection files, with the source document linked on every record.

How candidate positions and quotes get published

Software assistants read approved sources (campaign sites and news articles a human editor approved first) and extract candidate positions and quotes as drafts, each carrying its source link and a verbatim evidence excerpt. Nothing a machine writes is published automatically: every draft goes through an editorial review queue where a human approves, edits, or rejects it. Only approved, source-linked records appear on the site, and every published record keeps a full audit trail of who approved it and when.

Quality checks

Every assistant run is traced, and a sampled share of production activity is scored continuously by automated evaluators for citation faithfulness, neutrality, official-source-first behavior, and refusal correctness. Before any change to an assistant ships, it must pass a fixed test set of voter questions with known-correct properties; regressions block the change. Score drops raise internal alerts reviewed by the editor.

Corrections

See something wrong? Every fact on the site links to its source so you can check it yourself — and if we got it wrong, email tarik@radiomilwaukee.org and we'll review it against the source and correct it.