PCT Department Candidate Coverage


Quality Control:

Quality Control is for making sure that at any given time, our website reflects the candidates who will be appearing on voters' actual ballots.

We get our candidate lists from the Secretary of State's office, and only include those candidates that have met the qualifications to be on the ballot. We list their party affiliation as it will appear on the ballot. If we are missing a whole state's candidates from our site, it is either because the Secretary of State's office hasn't released a list yet or has released it recently and we haven't gotten to it yet. That doesn't mean we can't tell citizens any information about their candidates though.

First of all, they can research their incumbents on our site, who are likely to be up for election that year. You might need to look up what offices are up for election that year- this should be easy to find. To see who else might be up for election, you can direct them to the candidate list (if available) on the state elections' office website. Other sources can include: Politics1, The Green Papers, google searches for the office and district in question, or their local newspaper. If someone is looking for information on local candidates and local ballot measures, try directing them to their local election office (a directory of which is also on our site).

If someone claims we are missing a certain candidate from our site, it can be due to one of several things. We will need to investigate the situation further, but do not assume that we have it wrong:
More information about our processes for maintaining our database of candidates, see: here.

The day after an election, Elections Monitoring collects election results and inputs it into our database.

Please consult Elections Monitoring or the Elections Director for issues regarding election structure, ballot access, determining winners of an election, majority/plurality rules, lieutenant governor elections, judicial elections, and unopposed candidates being on the ballot.

Contact Info and Bios:

Providing contact information for candidates is essential to the democratic process, giving citizens access to those seeking to represent them.

Our campaign contact information is derived from several sources:
When we first add candidates to our website, people that haven't been up for election before will likely just have their name, basic contact info from the candidate list, and how they will appear on the ballot. The next phase of updates is getting extended contact information from the candidates' websites. This is essential for our own ability to contact candidates about the PCT, but linking to campaign websites also ensures that citizens will be able to find out more information about challengers, even if we don't have much on our own website. Incumbents will have contact information from their office's website as well.

Biographical information is compiled from the following sources, sometimes over many years (which makes it difficult sometimes to pinpoint where a particular piece of information comes from):
"Biographical information" is basically that candidate's resume, and includes such information as educational backgrounds, family information, professional backgrounds, organizational memberships, political experience, and committee assignments. Our policy is generally to get as much information as possible about a candidate, but we don't always have the time to do it for all candidates, and not all candidates have websites. That being said, all candidates have the opportunity to submit biographical information to us.

The Political Courage Test

The Political Courage Test is Vote Smart's signature in-house candidate questionnaire. The Political Courage Test asks all candidates one central question: "Are you willing to tell citizens where you stand on the issues you may face if elected?"

Vote Smart believes that knowing where the candidates stand is essential to a citizen's ability to vote smart. The PCT works to refocus elections to the issues that are important to voters, and away from advertising and campaign-controlled messages. This is central to achieving our mission to bring elections back to the hands of voters.

Our promotion of the Test on our website and through press releases also serves as a way to recognize candidates who demonstrate political courage. We realize that it takes a certain amount of courage for candidates to state their positions, as it exposes the candidate to opposition research. As a result, we forbid the use of the Vote Smart name or programs in any partisan activity, including advertising, debates, and speeches. We want candidates to feel secure in taking the PCT, so if we find out about such activity, we will take action against those that violate our terms. This is dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

PCT Design

Each year, we conduct research on what issues are both consistently the top concerns of the American people and also likely to come up in the next legislative session. They are determined by thoroughly examining national polls over the last three years, the majority, minority and third party platforms, legislative agendas, and by consulting with experts (journalists, academics, nonprofit executives, etc.) in each state’s politics and Congress to ensure that it is non-partisan and unbiased (more on Advisors later).

Recent Political Courage Tests are much shorter than previous tests. It is our hope that this will make it more accessible to both the candidates and visitors to our website. Questions are generally removed for one of three reasons: we were unable to build a strong defense for the question, the question was repetitive, and/or the question did not reveal a key issue position.

Typically we refer to it as "The Political Courage Test," but in reality it is a collection of tests. There is the Presidential and Congressional version which focuses on federal issues. Gubernatorial and State legislative candidates are given a test specific to their state, which includes issues that are coming up in legislatures across the country, as well as issues that are specific to that state.

For pre-2010 PCTs, we used a pass/fail system, where in order to pass a candidate had to address at least 70% of the issue categories. In 2012, we left it up to citizens to decide if the candidate had sufficient political courage. To help them make this judgment, we displayed the percentage of issue categories that they addressed, and highlighted which questions were actually answered by the candidate. As of 2016, we largely pass any candidate who is willing to answer at least a few of the questions.

In order to make it easier for citizens to compare their issues to those of the candidates, and to compare candidates to each other, we have steadily moved towards more generic questions. This allows the questions to be more flexible and it allows for easier research and determinations for Vote Easy. In the past, the majority of questions on previous tests required candidates to indicate only their support for an issue statement, we are now requiring candidates to indicate their support for or opposition to an issue question. Candidates have the option to answer any question in their own words, but we don't encourage this practice- it makes it harder for citizens to compare candidates and allows candidates to skirt the issues. We also allow candidates to submit position papers to us, but we post this on a separate area of our site, and this does not affect their calculation of political courage.

Testing Candidates

All general election candidates for President, Congress, Governor, and state legislature are tested over the course of 4-6 weeks (time allowing). As of 2016, we started the practice of testing all congressional candidates for the primary and general elections, while gubernatorial and state legislative candidates are only tested for their general election. All of these candidates are tested in a series of groups which are determined by the office and the date of the election. For example, all congressional elections in March will be a separate group from all the congressional elections in April, while the State Legislature elections of those same states in November will have yet more groups.

The idea behind the groupings is to stagger the workload of the PCT administration process while also giving us the greatest amount of flexibility in order to provide voters with PCT results as soon as possible. During the testing period Vote Smart documents several contacts made by staff, members of the media and respected members of both major parties asking each candidate to demonstrate Political Courage through this test.

Here is how we used to conduct PCT communications in the past, and is not all reflective of how we communicate with candidates today:

2012 Scheduled Contacts:
1) Mail Intro Letter, Bio Form, PCT, and media letter to all candidates, with instructions on how to fill it out online
(Check off "NPATs mailed" for each election stage mailed in the group. Candidates will not be explicitly told which questions will be researched by PVS staff, though we do tell them that this is a possibility.)
2) (1 week after mailing) Send Confirmation Email to all offices.
3) (3 weeks before deadline) Mail Red Card to all candidates
4) (2 weeks before deadline) Email Media letter for a 2nd time.
5) (1 week before deadline) Send Nag Email to all offices
6) (day before deadline) Email to all candidates who started the PCT online, but did not finish it. This is called the Hail Mary contact
7) (day of deadline) Email Post-Deadline contact (VoteEasy candidates only) that we have researched their issue positions and they have 48 hours to respond

2016 Scheduled Contacts: (Federal) Check 2015-2016 PCT Files in the drive for specific mailings
1) Mail candidate log-in information to all candidates with instructions on how to complete the PCT online as well as how to submit biographical information
2) (~1 week after mailing) Send confirmation email to all candidates
3) (~2 days after the email) Call all candidates to make sure they have received our mailing and give out login information when needed
4) (~3 weeks after mailing, 1 week prior to VE release) Upcoming VoteEasy release email
5) (~4 weeks after initial mailing, 2 days days after VE release) Post-VoteEasy release email
6) (To arrive a few days before deadline) Red card mailing
7) (~1 week prior to the deadline) "Letter from the President" email
8) (Day before deadline) Hail Mary email for candidates who started but did not finish the PCT

2024 Scheduled Contacts (as sketched out in the 2024 Elections Dept. Super-Calendar):
1) Send first email communication roughly a month before the deadline.
For example, the first PCT Group for congressional elections is 2/29/2024 (roughly a week before the first election in this group, which is 3/5/24). The first mailing for this would be on 1/25/24.
2) Send a second email (confirmation email) within a month before, and about ten days after the first mailing.
In our above example, 2/5/24 is when the second email goes out.
3) Send a third email communication (dubbed the “nag email”) roughly a week or so after the second.
This might be on or around 2/14/24.
4) Fourth email communication should be your “final push” email. This should always be a week before the deadline.
So, in this example it would be 2/22/24!
5) This is when you send the fifth and final email, usually the day after the deadline. This is what we call the “Hail Mary” email, and we then mention that we’ve released Issue Position research on the candidates in lieu of a PCT response.
This would be sent out on 3/1/24, the Friday before the election!

During the testing period, we do not disclose the status of any candidate's PCT to anyone besides the candidate in question until their Vote Easy or all PCT results have been released. All PCTs for a state are released to the public (on our website, on the "Vote Smart" tool, and through press releases) at the same time to be fair to all candidates. This is generally within the same week as the state's deadline. Candidates can add to or change their answers after the deadline has passed, but we don't necessarily encourage this.

To cut down on administration and the potential for error, we strongly encourage candidates to complete the Political Courage Test online at: https://secure.votesmart.org/candidate
We do not mail physical PCTs. We can email a pdf of the PCT to a candidate, but only on rare occasions when the candidate is simply incapable of completing it online.

Regardless of how a PCT is submitted and when, PVS will not accept a PCT or changes to a PCT without a signed statement from the candidate. This can come in the form of an certified electronic signature, a scanned image of their signature emailed to us, or via fax/mail. In certain time sensitive situations, we can also accept a verbal confirmation from the candidate themselves - just be sure to document the confirmation.

Sometimes candidates will miss the testing period for their state, because they were put on the ballot after the time of our first mailing. If we're still mailing other states, we will simply put them in a later group, and call them exception candidates. As a result, their deadline for the PCT will be later than other people in the state, and will be listed as pending until then. If they submit a PCT, we will put it up as soon as possible rather than waiting for the group's release, since other candidates in their state will already have their results posted. While excluded from the state's press release, they would be included in the nationwide press release.

If a candidate makes it onto the ballot after our last mailing in late September, there is not enough time for us to give them a full testing period. We will typically do a "Courtesy" mailing, where they are given the PCT but not required to fill it out. Some don't even make the courtesy mailing- we call them Added Candidates. While they are welcome to fill out the test at any time, we will not penalize them in any way.

Any candidate who is not allotted the same amount of time as their competitors (4-6 weeks) is not considered to have failed the PCT if they do not complete it.

Issue Position Research

Vote Smart will be researching the issue positions of Congressional (and some Presidential) candidates who do not respond to certain key questions on the Political Courage Test. We focus on 14 key issue areas (24 questions), which reflect the issues that are both publicly salient and likely to be addressed in the upcoming legislative session. The objective of this program is to provide a "snapshot" of a candidate's position on the most relevant issues even if the candidate is unwilling to provide that information. This will be displayed on our website. It should be very clear which answers come from the candidates themselves and which answers were inferred from PVS research. In the instance where we were unable to find a candidate's position, the answer will be left as an unknown position.

These answers are determined through thorough research of our own extensive database, as well as from other sources. The amount of evidence required for an answer can vary depending on the quality of the sources. Generally though, when possible, it is our policy to collect three or four citations per determination. Our sources for evidence include: answers to old PCTs, answers to other organizations' candidate surveys (considered a public statement), position papers, other speeches and public statements, legislation (both sponsorship and votes are used), and evaluations from interest groups.

These answers will be released simultaneously for all candidates within the same NPAT group, usually the week before the election. A candidate's PCT answers from that election year will always take precedence over Issue Position research. However, when a candidate skips a few of our PCT questions, those questions should be determined using our IP research in order to fill in all of the answers.

We have strict standards for what constitutes a yes answer vs. a no answer, so we should be able to defend any answer. Our standards are publicly-available, as are how we came up with each individual answer (our citations). At the very least, it should be consistent from candidate-to-candidate. Also, everything will be checked multiple times. While this certainly minimizes the chance of error, there is always a possibility something will be wrong.

We will also likely face criticism if: a citizen disagrees with our standards for an answer, a candidate has changed their position over time, a candidate voted "yes" on a key bill for reasons other than supporting the issue at hand, or we somehow misinterpret a public statement (this is harder to standardize). We will reevaluate answers by request to make sure they adhere to our standards, as we strive to be as accurate as possible, but our standards are not likely to change. PVS-researched answers should not be treated as fact - rather, they are non-partisan judgments based on fact.

Our greatest defense for any answer is that we have given every candidate multiple opportunities to provide their own answer, and they are free to provide us with a more accurate answer at any time. If a candidate tells us that they are legitimately undecided, whether through the other or expanded principles section or in reaction to the answer we have selected for them, we may use this as a citation to justify us giving them an answer of "Unable to Determine"- however, they will not receive credit for having political courage on that question.
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