Reference
The Ledger is a free public-record atlas. Read it, share it, and reuse the archives with care for the original publishers. These notes are a short guide, not a maze of fine print.
There is no paywall, no account, and no premium tier. Anyone may browse the site, download the cached datasets from the data cache, and point students, reporters, or tools at https://readtheledger.org. Short audience guides live under /for.
We ask for the same courtesy we give upstream: attribute the work, do not misrepresent official figures, and do not use automated access in a way that harms the publishers or this site.
Figures on The Ledger come from archived government and civic releases. When you quote a number, name both this site and the original publisher. Origin links sit on dataset pages and in the downloads catalog.
Methodology and integrity pages explain how we shape the archives. Prefer those notes over assumptions when something looks surprising.
The Books, The Floor, The Gavel, The Desk, and The Race are shelves of public records, not legal, financial, or campaign advice. Archives can lag certification, omit local contests, or carry publisher quirks we document when we find them.
For certified results or official filings, follow the origin link to the agency or court that issued the record.
Machine-readable entry points are welcome. Start with llms.txt and the downloads manifest. Prefer those product files over scraping HTML.
Keep request rates modest. Cache what you download. If you republish derived tables, say they came through The Ledger and still point to the upstream source.
The Race live map can show unofficial civicAPI tallies on top of the FEC archive. Those live figures are not part of the nightly refresh log, can change, and should be labeled as unofficial when you reuse them.
Presidential electoral-vote views for archived cycles use FEC workbooks we rebuild into local JSON. Check status for when those files were last built.
The site is provided as-is. We work to keep archives coherent and to surface integrity checks, but we do not warrant completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted availability.
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