In Delaware, the ballot is the people. So we built the record to match.
I want to tell you what we are about to release at First State Lens, and why I made us wait to release it.
Start with a fact about Delaware that most people who live here do not know. We have no ballot initiatives. There is no citizen referendum. Delaware is the only state in the country that can change its own constitution without ever putting the question to a vote. So when you get to the polls this November, you are not deciding on measures. You are deciding on people, and on the records those candidates carry.
Which leads to the only question that matters: can you actually see that record before you fill in the box? Right now, mostly, you cannot. Not in one place. Not without wading through each campaign's own version of itself.
Why the Civic Analytics Lab exists.
First State Lens is the Civic Analytics Lab at FirmSideAI. The thinking behind it is not complicated. The public record already exists. Roll-call votes, campaign finance filings, official candidate lists, statements made on the record. It is public by law. It is just scattered across a dozen government sites, formatted for clerks instead of for people, and easy to lose under the noise of an election year. That is not a scarcity problem. It is a logistics problem, and I have spent my whole working life on logistics.
So we take the primary record, put it in one standardized place, link every single fact back to the exact document it came from, and then we get out of the way.
Why nonpartisan is the entire point.
Here is the rule we hold ourselves to. Every candidate for an office gets the same fields, in the same order. Campaign finance appears as the raw number the candidate disclosed, with no adjective attached to it. Positions appear as the candidate's own words, quoted and dated, never our paraphrase of what they supposedly meant. Where a candidate has nothing for a field, a first-time candidate with no voting history for instance, we say that plainly instead of leaving a blank that reads like something is being hidden.
We do not rank, endorse, or grade anyone. The moment we tell you what to think about a candidate, we have handed you our opinion wearing the costume of data, and you have lost the one thing that made the page worth opening. A voter looking at two names does not need me to decide for them. They need the record, in the same shape for each person, with a link to check every line themselves.
Why I believe in this.
I have come to think that most of what separates a good decision from a bad one is not raw intelligence or gut instinct. It is data and context. The verifiable facts, plus enough surrounding truth to read those facts correctly. I ran a small business for thirteen years, where a wrong read cost real money, and the pattern held every time. The people who did well were rarely the smartest in the room. They were the ones who could see clearly and were not talked out of the numbers by the story sitting on top of them.
Casting a vote is that same act. You are making a decision that carries real weight, and you deserve to make it with the record in front of you instead of a slogan.
What this tracks, and when it opens.
The first record we are publishing covers the race for Delaware's single U.S. House seat. For each candidate: their official filing, their votes if they currently hold office, their campaign finance straight from federal disclosures, and their positions in their own quoted words. From there it grows to the rest of the 2026 ballot, U.S. Senate, the statewide offices, the General Assembly, and county government.
The full record goes public the week of July 14. That date is not arbitrary. Delaware's candidate filing deadline is noon on July 14. Until that deadline passes, the field is not final. Some candidates have filed and others have not filed yet, and publishing a side-by-side of a ballot that is not actually set would be its own quiet form of distortion. A nonpartisan record has to show the complete field, or it is neither complete nor honest.
So we built it, we verified every line by hand against the primary sources, and we are holding it until the ballot is real. Then it opens. If you vote in Delaware, this is being built for you.