About This Site

What is this?

Help Me Vote DC 2026! is a free, open-source voter guide for Washington, DC's June 16, 2026 Democratic Primary elections. It helps you compare candidates based on the issues you actually care about, using a 5-point Likert scale.

How are candidate positions sourced?

Every candidate position must be linked directly to a primary source — the candidate's own campaign website, an official questionnaire response, or a verified news article. No position is listed without a citation. We do not editorialize about which positions are "correct."

Where a candidate's position is unknown — because they haven't addressed an issue publicly — we mark it as "Unknown" rather than guessing or inferring.

Endorsement advisories

This site displays endorsement advisories (such as "Free DC: do not rank candidate X") as third-party opinions with a direct link to the source. These are not this site's own recommendations — they are factual reports of what named organizations have said.

Methodology

Every answer uses a 5-point scale: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree. For each question you answer, we compare your position to the candidate's and look at how many steps apart they are on that scale.

Two things you'll see, and why they can differ

Each compared question shows a label — the headline Agree, Partial, or Disagree — and also feeds the candidate's overall match percentage. These measure different things, so they can disagree:

• The label is a coarse headline: which side are you on? It uses simple, intuitive rules:
  • Agree — the same position.
  • Partial — one step apart: you're on the same side and differ only in intensity (for example, strongly agree vs. agree).
  • Disagree — two or more steps apart. Opposite sides, or one of you is neutral while the other is committed, counts as disagreement — not "partial" agreement.
• The percentage is the fine print: how far apart are you, exactly? It scales smoothly with the gap — 100% for an identical answer down to 0% for the polar opposite — and the final match percentage is the average of those values across every question you answered where the candidate has a known public stance. Keeping it graded is what lets a candidate who is only mildly off your views rank above one who is diametrically opposed.

Because of this, you may see a Disagree label on a question that still contributed a partial amount (say, 50%) to the percentage. That's intended: you can land on opposite sides yet not be maximally far apart.

Worked examples

Here is exactly how each case looks, from an identical answer to a complete opposite — the cards below render just like the question-by-question breakdown on your results page:

Questions you skip — and questions where the candidate has no known public stance — are excluded entirely. They get no label and never count toward the percentage.

A candidate with no known stances on any of your answered questions is shown as "Insufficient data" rather than scored at 0%.

Because a percentage can be misleading when it rests on only a handful of questions, every result also shows its coverage — for example, "based on 5 of 29 questions." A candidate could score 100% on the five questions we have positions for while their views on the other 24 remain unknown.

To keep that from being mistaken for a strong overall match, candidates we have documented on too few of your answered questions are grouped separately under "Limited information available" and sorted below the well-documented candidates, regardless of their percentage. We never guess or fill in a candidate's missing positions — they are simply ranked with less confidence until more sourced information is available.

Open source

This site is released under the AGPL-3.0 license. All source code and candidate data are publicly available. Contributions, corrections, and issue reports are welcome.

Disclaimer

This site is an independent civic project and is not affiliated with any candidate, campaign, political party, or government agency. If you have any comments, suggestions for improvement, or concerns, please email me at dcvoting_quiz_feedback@pm.me or open an issue on GitHub.