About EmpoweredVoteBot

Empowered Vote is an antipartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We publish neutral, sourced information about elected officials and candidates so that voters can make informed decisions.

EmpoweredVoteBot is the automated fetcher we use to find and check the original sources behind that published information. It does two things:

1. It reads public pages to find original sources we can cite for a claim about an official — for example, the news report or public record where the official said or did something.
2. It re-fetches those source pages to verify them — to confirm the quoted text is really there and has not changed.

In both cases the goal is the same: accurate, factual information, always published with a link back to the original source. It is not a search engine and not a training crawler.

What the bot does

• It requests public web pages — both pages we are considering as a source and pages we have already cited.
• It reads the visible text of a page to find, or to confirm, a quotation we attribute to that source.
• Everything it helps us publish carries a link back to the original source, so a reader can always go and check for themselves.
• It runs at a low volume — roughly a few hundred to a thousand pages in a normal month.

What the bot does not do

• It does not collect personal data about you or your readers.
• It does not fill in forms, log in, or attempt to reach pages behind a paywall or a login.
• It does not use its data for advertising or to train machine-learning models.

How we identify ourselves

Our requests carry this user-agent, so you can always recognise us in your logs:

EmpoweredVoteBot/1.0 (+https://empowered.vote/crawler; nonprofit civic citation verification; contact info@empowered.vote)

We identify ourselves honestly. We do not disguise the bot as a person's web browser.

How we crawl — our commitments

• We respect robots.txt. Before we fetch a page, we check your site's robots.txt for the EmpoweredVoteBot user-agent. If it disallows a path, we do not fetch that page from your site.
• We do not use stealth tactics. We do not route requests through residential or mobile proxy networks, and we do not rotate fingerprints to defeat bot protection.
• When a site declines, we stop. If your robots.txt excludes us, or your server blocks us, we do not try to work around it. Where a public archive (such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine) holds a copy, we may verify against that archived copy instead; otherwise we simply record that the source could not be verified.
• We crawl gently. We fetch a small number of pages and do not hammer a site.

How to exclude us

If you would prefer that we do not fetch your pages, you can block us in your robots.txt:

User-agent: EmpoweredVoteBot
Disallow: /

We honour this. You can also disallow specific paths rather than the whole site.

If you would like to reach us directly — to ask us to stop, to report a problem, or to ask a question — email info@empowered.vote. We will respond.

Why this matters to voters

Every claim we publish about an official is meant to be traceable to a real, checkable source. Verifying those sources is how we keep that promise. We do it in the open, under our own name, and within the limits above.

Empowered Vote is an antipartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit. EIN 33-1841708. Back to Empowered Vote