How this was built

This page exists so you can check the site rather than trust it. It covers where every quote came from, how topics were assigned, what the method misses, and how to get something fixed.

Where the words come from

Every quote is taken from a candidate's own official statement, filed with their municipality by the nomination deadline and published unedited by that municipality:

• City of North Vancouver — Candidate Profiles
• District of North Vancouver — See who is running

Statements were retrieved on September 28, 2026. Neither municipality verifies the accuracy of what candidates write, and neither does this site. Contact details, photos, nomination documents and campaign links come from the same two pages.

How quotes are guaranteed to be verbatim

This is the part that matters most, so it is worth being precise about.

Topic tagging is done by a language model, but the model is never allowed to produce text. Each statement is split into numbered sentences, the model is shown those numbered sentences, and it replies with sentence numbers only. The site's own code then cuts those exact characters out of the stored source document.

That means a paraphrase or an invented quote is not something the process tries to detect — it is something the process cannot produce. Every passage is additionally re-checked against its source before publishing, and any passage that does not match character-for-character is dropped rather than shown. The worst error the method can make is quoting a real sentence under a topic you would not have filed it under.

What the site does not do

• No ratings, scores, grades or endorsements. Every candidate gets identical fields and identical space.
• No conclusions from silence. Where a candidate has not addressed a topic, the site says the sources checked did not cover it. That is a fact about our reading, not a judgement about them.
• No alphabetical advantage. Candidates within a race are listed in a randomised order that changes per browsing session. You can switch to A–Z with the button on any list.
• No tracking. No analytics, no cookies, no accounts. Your shortlist, if you make one, stays in your own browser.

Known limitations

• Candidate statements are short — a few hundred words. A candidate with detailed policy on their own website may look thinner here than they are. Their campaign link is always shown; follow it.
• 2 candidates published a statement that sets out no position on any tracked topic — usually because it is biography rather than policy. They are listed as such, not as silent.
• The 10 topics are a starting set drawn from what candidates themselves wrote about most. They are not an official list and they are not exhaustive.
• One sentence can legitimately belong to two topics, so the same quote sometimes appears in two places.
• Nothing here is scraped from news coverage, all-candidates meetings, social media or interviews. Those are real sources of candidates' views; they are simply outside what this site claims to cover.

Corrections

If a quote misrepresents you, a topic is wrong, a link is broken, or something on the voting page is out of date, say so and it will be fixed within 48 hours — or the item will be removed while it is checked. Candidates, campaigns and readers are all equally welcome to ask.

corrections@northvanvotes.ca— or hello@northvanvotes.ca for anything else. Both reach the same person.

Corrections that are a matter of record — a wrong link, a mis-transcribed date — are simply fixed. A request to remove or reword an accurate quotation from a published statement will be declined, with the reason given; the statement is a public document and the quote will keep pointing at it.

Independence

North Van Votes is not affiliated with any candidate, campaign, elector organization, political party, municipality or school district.

Built on the open record

The whole thing is a small pipeline that downloads public documents, caches them, extracts quotes, and renders static pages. The cached source documents are kept alongside the code so the dataset can be rebuilt and checked by anyone.