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Logan County Republicans Central Committee · Illinois

How we gather the facts

  1. Start with the official record. Laws and votes come from the Illinois General Assembly's own bill pages and roll calls. Budget, tax and pension numbers come from the state agencies that publish them: the Department of Revenue, the Governor's budget office, COGFA (the legislature's own forecasting commission) and the Auditor General.
  2. Use federal data for comparisons. Population and school finance come from the U.S. Census Bureau; electricity prices from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. They measure every state the same way, so Illinois can be compared fairly with its neighbors.
  3. Use reporting for events and quotes. When a page says someone said or did something, it links to the news story or official press release where you can read it yourself.
  4. No source, no number. If we can't find a primary source for a figure, it comes off the page, even when we've seen it repeated elsewhere.
  5. Round the safe way and date everything. Numbers are rounded so they never overstate, and each one says what year or date it measures. Monthly figures (like unemployment) are marked as monthly.
  6. Show the other side. Where a fact cuts the other way, such as the state's recent credit upgrades, we say so on the same page.
  7. Local means local. Logan County is served by Ameren, not ComEd, and has no toll roads, so the pages say which numbers apply here and which are statewide or Chicago-area.

Local data, and its gaps

For Logan County we use published records: the Logan County Clerk for elections and early voting, and for public safety the FBI's Crime Data Explorer and the Lincoln Police Department's own monthly reports. When a data set has gaps, for example months a department's numbers never reached the state's reporting system, we say so instead of treating a missing month as a drop.

Songs, games and AI

Our songs and lyric videos are made with AI, just for fun, and every one says so. They are not sung by the candidates. The facts in them come from the same sources listed below. How we use AI.

See something wrong?

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Every source we cite

Illinois government records

Federal government data

Research groups and analysts (including some with a point of view, labeled on the page)

News reporting (events, votes and quotes)

Candidates' own websites (biographies in their own words)

Reference