Where everything comes from
Sources and method
We publish where everything comes from. Every factual claim on this site should be checkable by you, without taking our word for it.
Last updated 2026-07-28.
This site makes factual claims about Florida government, elections, budgets, and law. Every one of them should be checkable by you, without taking our word for it. Below is where we get our information, how we decide what is solid enough to publish, and what we do when we get something wrong.
We are openly progressive and we say so. That is a statement about what we want, not a license to be loose with what is true. Opinion on this site is labeled as opinion. Everything else is sourced.
How we decide what to publish
Primary sources first. Government records, statute and constitutional text, court dockets, certified election results, agency data, and meeting minutes. When a primary source exists, we use it and link it.
Secondary sources are for context, not for facts. We read journalism to find out what happened and where to look. We then go get the underlying document. If we cite a news outlet for a fact, it is because the fact is a matter of reporting rather than record, and we say so.
Contested findings are labeled contested. Where credible researchers disagree, we present the disagreement rather than picking the version we like. Our readers can hold two arguments at once.
Unverified claims do not publish. We keep a running list of things we believe but have not yet documented. They stay off the site until sourced. Some of our pages show this list openly, including items we are still working on.
Opinion is marked. Analysis, argument, and recommendation appear in labeled callouts, visually distinct from documented claims.
Primary government sources
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Florida Department of State, Division of Elections | Election dates and deadlines, statewide voter registration by party, candidate and committee filings, and certified election results |
| Leon County Supervisor of Elections | Local officeholders, terms, salaries, sample ballots, early voting locations, county campaign finance, and historical results |
| Florida Division of Elections campaign finance database | Contributions and expenditures for state candidates and committees |
| County Supervisors of Elections | Certified county canvasses, which are the sourcing floor for any county-level vote percentage. Not news coverage, not aggregators |
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Florida Constitution | Article I, Section 24 on access to public records and meetings, Article VI on voting and elections, Article VII on finance and taxation, Article VIII on local government, and Article XI on amendments |
| Florida Statutes | Chapter 119 on public records, including section 119.01 on the state's open-records policy and section 119.15, the Open Government Sunset Review Act; Chapter 125 on county government; and Chapter 106 on campaign financing |
| Florida Senate | Bill text, joint resolutions, roll call votes, committee actions, staff bill analyses, and the published Senate Rules |
| Florida House of Representatives | Bill text, staff analyses, and roll call votes |
| Florida House and Senate staff analyses | Bill analyses prepared for committees, used for legislative intent and for structural facts about local government |
| Local Government Formation Manual, Florida House of Representatives | Charter county status, incorporation, and the statutory framework for local government formation. Confirm the edition in use, the 2002 edition is the one currently cited |
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research | Revenue estimating conference reports and fiscal impact analyses |
| Florida Department of Revenue | Tax structure, collections, and exemption data |
| General Appropriations Act | State budget line items |
| Leon County adopted budgets and auditor reports | Local spending and audit findings |
| City of Tallahassee adopted budgets and auditor reports | Local spending and audit findings |
| Transparency Florida | State budget amendments and expenditure disclosures, operated through the Executive Office of the Governor |
| Florida Department of Transportation, project and contract records | Road project scope, contract award, and schedule records, obtained by public records request where not posted |
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Leon County Board of County Commissioners | Agendas, certified minutes, and staff reports |
| City of Tallahassee | Commission agendas, minutes, and city manager reports |
| Florida League of Cities | Legislative bill summaries and municipal impact analysis |
| Florida Association of Counties | County seats, county population and general information. An association of the county governments themselves rather than a state agency, so we treat it as one tier below a state record |
| County sheriff's offices | Contract policing arrangements between a sheriff's office and a municipality |
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Florida Commission on Ethics | Complaint dispositions and financial disclosure filings |
| Second Judicial Circuit and Leon County court dockets | Active and resolved litigation |
| Federal court records, PACER | Federal cases involving Florida officials or agencies |
| U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit | Published opinions and dockets in federal appeals arising from Florida |
| U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida | Orders, injunctions, and dockets in federal cases filed in South Florida |
| Justia, Florida Supreme Court and federal appellate opinions | Locating full opinion text. Justia is a republisher, not the issuing court. A citation retrieved here is repointed at the court's own posting before it publishes |
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Florida Division of Emergency Management | State emergency declarations, expenditure records, and grant applications, including records released under public records litigation |
| Federal Emergency Management Agency | Federal grant programs and award documents, including the Shelter and Services Program |
| Florida Governor, executive orders index | Executive orders, including emergency declarations and the orders extending them |
Maps and geographic data
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Florida Department of State, Division of Elections | County-level election results map used in our site logo. Contest and year: [PENDING] |
| Florida Geographic Data Library | County and district boundary shapefiles |
| Leon County Supervisor of Elections, maps | Precinct and district boundaries |
Our logo depicts county-level results from a specific contest. The agency is the Florida Department of State, Division of Elections. The contest and year are still pending, and the full citation will be added here and in the image caption when it is confirmed.
Research and academic sources
Gilens, Martin and Benjamin I. Page (2014). "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens." Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 12, No. 3.
We cite this for its finding that the probability of federal policy change stays near 30 percent regardless of how much or how little average citizens support it, while economic elites and business-oriented interest groups show substantial independent influence.
We present this as contested, because it is. Bashir (2015) in Research and Politics, along with work by Enns (2015) and Branham and others (2017), argues the underlying statistical test underestimates average citizens' influence, finding roughly comparable rates of preference satisfaction between wealthy and average Americans under equivalent opposition. The original authors did not describe their findings as showing oligarchy; that framing came from press coverage. We link both sides and let readers judge.
Case Studies of City-County Consolidation: Reshaping the Local Government Landscape. Used for the documented history of Tallahassee and Leon County consolidation efforts.
National data sources
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Pew Research Center | Voter turnout and validated-voter analysis |
| United States Elections Project, University of Florida Election Lab | Voting-eligible population estimates and turnout rates, including the per-cycle general election turnout datasets we use for Florida |
| U.S. Census Bureau | Population, demographic, and economic data, and the Place by County reference files we use for the list of incorporated municipalities in each Florida county |
| Brennan Center for Justice | Voting rights law analysis |
| Campaign Legal Center | Election law and rights restoration analysis |
We use national data sparingly. This is a Florida site. National figures appear only where they provide necessary context for a Florida claim.
Research and advocacy organizations
These are neither government records nor journalism. Their findings are organizational investigations, and we attribute them that way: "Amnesty International concluded" reads differently from "a court found" and must. Where an advocacy organization obtains government records through litigation, those records are primary even though the organization is a party.
| Source | What we use it for |
|---|---|
| Amnesty International | Human rights investigations and country reports. Findings are organizational research, not adjudicated fact, and are attributed as such |
| Friends of the Everglades | Environmental litigation and the government records obtained through it |
| First Amendment Foundation | Public records exemptions tracker and legislator transparency grades. Its tracker is the standard reference for how many exemptions exist, which is why every count on this site traces back to it rather than to a news repetition of it |
| Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Open Government Guide | State-by-state open records and open meetings law summaries |
| Florida Ethics Institute | Analysis of Florida ethics and transparency legislation |
Journalism we read
We read these to find out what is happening and where to look for the underlying documents. Citing them here is not endorsement, and appearing here does not mean they endorse us.
What we have corrected
We maintain a public corrections log. Errors get fixed, dated, and explained. We do not quietly edit.
We also maintain an internal record of claims we investigated and rejected before publishing. A representative sample, because we think this is more useful to you than a clean record would be:
| Claim we looked into | What we found |
|---|---|
| That federal or Florida law was changed to let a specific felon vote | False. No law was changed. The relevant provision, which predates the conviction, defers to the law of the state where a conviction occurred. |
| That Florida constitutional amendments never clear the 60 percent threshold | False. Several have, including felony rights restoration in 2018 at roughly 65 percent and the minimum wage increase in 2020 at 60.8 percent. The threshold's real effect is on measures that land between 50 and 60 percent. |
| That a millionaire income tax is available to Florida | Constitutionally blocked. Article VII, Section 5 bars income tax on natural persons at every income level. |
| That a higher property tax rate could be levied on high-value second homes | Blocked in that form. Article VII, Section 2 requires a uniform millage rate within each taxing unit. |
None of these appear as assertions anywhere on this site. We list them because we believed some of them once.
Public records
Florida's public records law, Chapter 119, is genuinely strong and almost nobody uses it. We do, and we will publish what we obtain.
If you have obtained records you think matter, send them and we will verify before publishing.
Tell us we are wrong
If you find an error on this site, tell us. We will check it against the source, fix it if we are wrong, and log the correction publicly with what changed and when.
We would rather be corrected than be trusted for the wrong reasons.