Data sources

What's confirmed right now

• Candidate names, parties, and districts for U.S. House (Districts 1 & 2), Indiana State Senate (Districts 1, 4, 6), and Indiana State House (Districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20), sourced from the Indiana Secretary of State's Election Division 2026 General Election Candidate List.
• County row offices (Assessor, Auditor, Circuit Court Clerk, Coroner, Prosecuting Attorney, Recorder, Sheriff, Treasurer) and County Council / Commissioner races for Lake, Porter, and LaPorte counties, from a general-election candidate list provided directly by the site owner. County Council and Commissioner districts require a manual pick on the ballot page, those boundaries aren't part of standard Census geography.
• Full biographies for Frank Mrvan, Barb Regnitz, and Rudy Yakym, sourced from official House biographies, Ballotpedia, GovTrack, and campaign statements reported by WFYI and the Indiana Capital Chronicle.
• Election dates and deadlines, sourced from the Indiana Secretary of State's official 2026 election calendar.
• Township races (Assessor, Board, Trustee) for all 11 Lake County, 12 Porter County, and 21 LaPorte County townships, and town council races for Cedar Lake, Dyer, Lowell, Schererville, St. John, Winfield (Lake County), Kouts, Ogden Dunes (Porter County), and Long Beach (LaPorte County), Indiana's only municipal elections this cycle, since cities and larger towns vote in odd years (next: 2027). Both resolve automatically from your address.
• Judicial races for Porter and LaPorte County Circuit/Superior Court seats, plus Lake County's judicial retention votes (a yes/no vote on whether a sitting judge keeps their seat, rather than a contested race, Indiana fills these Superior Court seats by appointment), all from the same user-provided list.
• Two statewide ballot measures (bail policy and judge residency requirements) and four statewide judicial retention votes (three Court of Appeals judges, one Tax Court judge), verified independently against Ballotpedia and Indiana news coverage, and identical on every ballot in the state.
• School board races for 13 school corporations across the three counties, the first year these races appear on the November general ballot in Indiana. Not resolvable from your address alone (a corporation can span parts of several townships and towns), so the ballot page offers a manual picker. Gary Community School Corporation is confirmed to have no election this cycle, its board is state-appointed due to financial distress oversight. A further 12 corporations (Merrillville, Munster, River Forest, Tri-Creek, Whiting, and Hanover in Lake County; Portage Township, Porter Township, Union Township, and Valparaiso in Porter County; Michigan City Area Schools and New Prairie United in LaPorte County) don't yet have confirmed 2026 candidates and are shown as "not yet confirmed" rather than omitted.

Candidate profile standard

Every candidate and retention judge on this site gets the same profile template: current role, background, key stated priorities, relevant record, political experience, notable public statements, and a "Primary Sources Used" list. Research draws only on official government sources (House.gov, Senate.gov, Congress.gov, state/county government sites, courts.in.gov) and official candidate sources (a candidate's own campaign site, official statements, direct quotations). Wikipedia, news articles, PACs, and advocacy or ranking sites are not used as evidence. Where a claim can't be traced to one of those sources, the profile says so, "Not found in the permitted primary/official sources", rather than filling the gap.

Full research (real background, quotes, and sourced record) currently exists for 7 people: the two candidates in the marquee IN-01 race, IN-02's incumbent, and the four judges up for statewide retention. Every other candidate, including all 44 state legislative candidates, all county row-office and judicial candidates, and all ~370 township, town, and school board candidates, has a confirmed name, party, and office, but the profile fields beyond that are marked "Not found in the permitted primary/official sources" rather than researched individually. For the large majority of local candidates, that's not a research gap so much as reality: first-time township board or school board candidates typically have no official government page, campaign website, or voting record to cite.

A correction we caught

A supplementary research document submitted for this site claimed Indiana's congressional map had changed for 2026, moving all of Porter County into the 2nd District. We checked independently: a mid-decade redistricting bill was proposed in late 2025, but the Indiana Senate voted it down 31-19 on December 11, 2025. The original 2021 map is still in effect. This site was not changed to reflect the claimed new map. The same document also listed a different Republican nominee than what an earlier official candidate list showed for Lake County Council District 1, that discrepancy hasn't been resolved, and the official candidate list's version is what's currently shown.

What's not in here yet

• Full profiles for most state legislative candidates. Their name, party, and district are confirmed and shown, but biography, positions, funding, and voting records have not yet been researched. Each thin profile says so explicitly rather than leaving a misleadingly polished-looking blank.
• Ballot measures, if any are certified for this cycle in these counties.

How the address lookup works

Entering your address on the ballot page sends it to a small server function (/api/geocode) running on this site, which forwards it to the U.S. Census Bureau's free, public Geocoding Services API, a live, currently-supported government service. It returns your exact congressional district, state senate district, and state house district, which we match against the confirmed race data above.

We use the Census Bureau's API rather than Google's former Civic Information "Representatives" API, which Google discontinued in April 2025. Running the lookup through our own server function (instead of calling the Census API directly from your browser) avoids cross-origin browser restrictions and means no API key is exposed.

Your address is used only for that one lookup and is not logged or stored on any server, saved picks and your last search live only in your own browser's storage.

Why LaPorte County needs a full address

LaPorte County is split between Indiana's 1st and 2nd Congressional Districts along township lines, and it doesn't have a state senate seat up for election this cycle at all. A ZIP code can't reliably capture that, a full address, resolved district-by-district, can.

How every candidate is treated the same

Every candidate, incumbent or first-time challenger, thin profile or full one, uses the identical page template and section order. Where information is missing, the page says so plainly rather than leaving a gap that reads as neglect or as an editorial choice.