POLITICAL HQ

What's New

Recent updates and improvements to Political HQ.

September 22, 2026

Precinct lists now match the voter record

  • Selecting a precinct on the heat map used to include anyone whose map pin fell inside the outline, even when their voter record named a different precinct. Those lists now follow the voter record, so they line up with the Precinct Roster — though the map can still show a handful of contacts the Roster doesn't, ones who aren't in the voter file at all. Some precinct counts will be smaller than before.
August 16, 2026

Report a problem without leaving the app

  • There’s a new “Report an issue” item in your account menu, beside Help and What’s New. Anyone signed in can use it — you don’t need a particular role.
  • Pick what kind of thing it is — something is broken, a new feature, content that’s inaccurate, or an improvement to something that already exists — then give it a subject and the details. The form asks you for different details depending on what you picked, because “the steps to reproduce it” is the wrong question for a feature request.
  • It records the page you came from, along with your browser and screen size, so you don’t have to describe any of that. Open it from the page the problem is on and that context comes along by itself.
  • Your own reports are listed underneath the form, newest first, with whether each one has reached the team yet. You see yours and nobody else’s.
  • If that hand-off to the team ever fails, your report is still saved and it’s sent again automatically — you never need to submit the same thing twice.
  • Separately: the Heat Map now sends about a fifth less data than it used to. It’s still slow to open the first time. This was one step, not the fix.
August 15, 2026

The app is faster — and two things that quietly weren’t working now do

  • Opening a note from a notification used to take fifteen seconds or more. It’s now quick. The cause wasn’t your connection: the page was asking the database to count up every voter in the county — several separate times — just to show you one precinct, and each of those requests waited for the one before it to finish.
  • The Precinct Roster, the Routes list, the Boundaries page, the dashboard and the public pages are all faster for the same family of reasons. Where the app was asking for the same unchanging information over and over, it now asks once and remembers the answer — for a few minutes on anything tied to voter data, up to an hour on the public pages. Anything you or an admin change is published immediately regardless; the timer is only a backstop.
  • Switching between the Voter Heat Map and the Census Map no longer throws the map away and rebuilds it. Flipping to Census and back used to re-download every voter dot; now both maps stay put and the switch is instant.
  • Changing someone’s Party at the door no longer reloads the whole route. It used to re-fetch every stop on your walk list to update one word, which on a phone on cellular was the slowest thing a canvasser could do. Now the change appears immediately and nothing else moves.
  • Fixed: a budget summary written by the AI assistant didn’t reliably show up on the public budget pages. It does now, as soon as it’s generated.
  • Fixed: publishing an article refreshed the Myths and Admin Watch index pages but not the new article’s own page, so the thing you just published could take a while to appear at its own address.
  • One thing we haven’t fixed yet, so you know where you stand: the Heat Map is still slow the first time you open it. It draws about 170,000 points and it genuinely has to fetch all of them. That one needs a deeper change and it’s the next thing we’re working on.
August 10, 2026

Notes and knocks now show real names

  • A note or a knock recorded by someone whose account had no name on it used to read “Unnamed user.” Your admins can now set a first and last name on any account, so the log shows who actually did the work.
  • This is retroactive in the way that matters and not in the way it doesn’t: once a name is set, everything that person records from then on carries it. Entries already written keep the name they were written with.
August 9, 2026

Mark a door as knocked

  • Every stop on a walk list now has a “Mark knocked” button. Tap it when you’ve worked the door and the stop shows “Knocked,” with a line underneath saying who knocked and when.
  • The marker means knocked by anyone, not knocked by you. That’s the whole point: two people working the same route from opposite ends used to have no way of telling that a house was already done, and would knock it twice.
  • It’s recorded per household, not per person. A door with three voters behind it is one knock, because you visited it once — “Knocked by Dave Ruiz” printed three times would read as three separate visits.
  • You can undo your own knock — there’s an “undo” link beside your entry. You can’t undo someone else’s; their visit is their record, not yours.
  • The list refreshes about once a minute, and again when you come back to the page, so a door a teammate just worked stops being a surprise without you having to reload anything.
  • If we can’t reach the record, you’ll see “Couldn’t check which doors have been knocked. Some stops may already be done.” We’d rather tell you that than show you a clean list that quietly means nothing — an absence of markers should never read as a confident “nobody has been here.”
August 7, 2026

“Coordinator” is now called “Connector”

  • The role that plans routes and hands them to volunteers is now called Connector everywhere it appears on screen — in your account’s role, in the admin user list, and throughout the Help lessons. If you held that role yesterday, you hold exactly the same one today under a new name.
  • Nothing about what the role can do has changed. Same pages, same permissions, same routes, same scoping to your assigned districts and precincts.
  • One place still shows the old word: the “Add person” search in a route’s settings dialog prints each account’s raw internal role, and internally the role is still stored as “coordinator.” The Help lesson on sharing a route says so.
August 6, 2026

Help is now built into the app

  • There’s a new “Help” item in your account menu. It opens a set of short lessons on Community Compass, written for the role you actually have.
  • You see your own lessons and nobody else’s. A canvasser gets six, covering everything a volunteer touches. A connector gets those plus the map, selections, routes and sharing. A candidate gets the lot.
  • Each lesson is numbered steps, a screenshot of the real screen, and a “You did it right if…” line so you can tell whether it worked. They’re ordered so each one builds on the last — read straight through, or jump to the one you need.
  • The lessons are written from the app itself, so where they name a button or a label, that is what is on your screen.
August 6, 2026

Party edits on the Precinct Roster now tell you what happened

  • Changing someone’s Party on the Precinct Roster used to save quietly and leave the badge showing the old value. If the save was refused, the screen looked exactly the same — there was no way to tell the two apart without reloading the page.
  • Now the badge changes to your new value and “(edited)” appears beside it. If a save is refused you get “Couldn’t save” with the reason, and nothing is changed.
  • The Party control on a walk list always behaved this way. The two now match.
August 3, 2026

Chat with your team inside a route

  • Open a route and there’s a “Chat” button in the bar at the top. Everyone the route is shared with — whoever created it and every canvasser walking it — can read and post, so a question at a door doesn’t have to wait for a phone call.
  • Tick “Needs help” on a message when you need an answer. It pins to the top of the thread, notifies everyone else on the route, and puts a “Needs help” marker on that route’s row in the Routes list. Opening the thread clears both.
  • Ordinary messages don’t send a notification — they show as an unread count on the Chat button instead. That’s deliberate: if the bell rang for every “20 doors done,” you’d stop noticing the ones that matter.
  • This is not a pager, and we’d rather say so than let you find out. New messages only appear while the chat panel is open, and notifications stay inside the app — there’s no text or email.
  • You can edit your own messages, and the thread shows “edited” when you do. Only the route’s owner and your admins can delete a message.
  • Messages don’t stay forever. Each one is kept 30 days, or until 30 days after the route’s walk date if you’ve set one — whichever is longer, and never more than 90 days. The thread never prints and never appears in a CSV export.
  • Route settings has a new optional “Walk date,” which is the date that retention is measured from.
  • One thing to be aware of before typing: anything you write is readable by everyone the route is shared with, and by your admins. It’s a good place for “nobody home before 6” and a bad place for anything you wouldn’t want the whole team to read.
August 3, 2026

Street names now sit on top of the map data

  • Road and place names on every map — the Heat Map, the Census map, the 2024 Presidential map, and the map on a route — now draw above the voter dots and district boundaries instead of underneath them.
  • This came from a request for maps with more easily identifiable roads. The cause turned out not to be the map’s styling: the street names were always there, they were just being painted over by everything drawn on top of them.
  • Worth knowing: zoomed a long way out over a dense area, names can still be hard to pick out against a solid field of dots. They get easier as you zoom in toward the addresses you’re actually working.
August 3, 2026

A canvasser role for volunteers

  • Your admins can now assign a “Canvasser” role, built for volunteers who walk routes but shouldn’t have the whole voter file.
  • A canvasser only sees routes that have been shared with them, and only the contacts on those routes. They can’t browse the Heat Map, search for voters, or create, share, rename or delete a route.
  • What they can do is the job at the door: read the walk list, add a note on a contact, update a contact’s party, and take part in the route’s chat.
  • If someone who owns routes is later changed to canvasser-only, their old routes go quiet for them until an admin shares one back. Nothing is deleted, and nobody else’s access changes.
August 2, 2026

Notes and party updates from the walk list

  • Every contact on a walk list now has a “Notes” link. Tap it to read what’s been recorded at that door before and add your own, without leaving the route.
  • These are the same notes as on the Precinct Roster — a note added at a door shows up there, and one added there shows up at the door.
  • The walk list also now shows each contact’s Primary Vote, and lets you update their Party right on the row.
  • If a contact isn’t in the voter file, your note is still saved against them, but it won’t appear on the Precinct Roster — the note box tells you so at the time rather than leaving you to wonder.
August 1, 2026

Share a canvassing route with your team

  • You can now share a saved route with specific people. Open a route, choose “Route settings,” search for someone by name or email, and pick what they can do — “View” to walk it, or “View & edit” to also rename it and adjust the stops.
  • Only you and your admins can share a route or delete it. Someone you shared it with can’t pass it on to anyone else, so you always know who has it.
  • Routes shared with you show up under “Shared with me” on the Routes page, with the owner’s name and whether you can edit.
  • One thing to expect: a shared route only shows you the contacts inside your own assigned area. If some stops fall outside it, the route will tell you how many aren’t available to you rather than quietly leaving them out.
  • New “Back to selection” link on a route takes you back to the Heat Map with the area you originally drew redrawn and the same contacts reselected, so you can adjust it and re-plan.
August 1, 2026

Manage routes without opening them

  • Each route on the Routes page now has edit and delete buttons right on the row, so tidying up no longer means opening every route first.
  • Deleting asks you to confirm on the row itself before anything happens.
August 1, 2026

Find older Alabama bills by number or title

  • Searching for an Alabama bill from an earlier session now works. Previously the search only looked at the last few sessions, so a bill from, say, 2016 came back empty even though it was there.
  • This works whether you search by bill number (“HB174”) or by typing the bill’s title — and if you pick a specific session from the dropdown, your search now stays inside that session instead of ignoring it.
July 28, 2026

Plan a walking route from any map selection

  • Select an area on the Heat Map and choose “Plan route” to turn those contacts into an ordered door-knocking route. Pick your starting point — the center of your selection, your current location, or any address you type in.
  • You get a walking order grouped by household, the total distance and rough time, a map of the route, and a count of how many times it crosses to the other side of a street.
  • Print the walk list, export it to CSV, or tap “Navigate” on any stop to open it in Google Maps. Saved routes live under “Routes” in the sidebar.
July 27, 2026

Cost of Living: clearer break-even and benefit warnings

  • The Break-Even view now looks and reads the same whether you open it from the summary or the detailed breakdown — the two versions had drifted apart.
  • Benefit cliff warnings now apply to every household type, not just some. If earning a bit more would cost you more in lost benefits than you gain in pay, you’ll see it.
  • Changing your household type now re-suggests an appropriate health insurance premium instead of keeping the old one.
July 25, 2026

Census Map: compare census data with the 2024 vote

  • In compare mode you can now put any census measure up against the 2024 presidential margin, to see how a county’s makeup relates to how it voted.
  • Counties are grouped into flip, defend, and competitive tiers so you can focus on the margins that matter.
  • A word of caution the data itself suggests: relationships that look strong county-by-county can be much weaker per voter, because small rural counties carry the same visual weight as large ones. The readout shows you both.
July 24, 2026

Census Map: 2024 presidential results

  • The Census Map has a new “2024 Presidential” view showing each county’s Trump-vs-Harris margin, shaded red to blue.
  • Filter to the closest counties with the focus selector — “Flippable” for margins within 10 points, “Competitive” for within 15 — so the tight races stand out from the blowouts.
  • Results come from the Alabama Secretary of State’s certified precinct returns.
July 23, 2026

County Data: compare counties side by side

  • The County Data explorer can now show a second county next to the one you’re viewing, with the statewide median beside both, so you can see how two places differ on any indicator.
  • Clicking a county on the Census Map also shows whether it sits above or below the state median for the measure you’re looking at.
July 23, 2026

Legislation is now open to explore

  • Everyone signed in can now browse the Legislation explorer — search U.S. federal and Alabama state bills and see sponsors, votes, and full bill text. It used to be limited to certain roles.
  • New: get a plain-language AI summary of any bill with a subscription, in your choice of reading level — from a simple “ELI5” explanation up to college level, plus a laid-back “Podcast Bro” take.
July 22, 2026

Census Map: compare two measures

  • On the Census Map you can now pick a second indicator under “Compare with…” to compare two measures at once — for example, poverty rate against uninsured rate.
  • Flip the map between the two with the “Show on map” toggle, and a scatter chart plots all 67 counties so you can see whether the two measures move together, with a plain-language readout of how strong the relationship is.
  • Hover a county on the map or a dot on the chart and the other lights up too, so it’s easy to spot where a county sits on both measures.
July 22, 2026

Maps: new statewide Census Map

  • The Maps page now has a “Census Map” tab alongside the Voter Heat Map. Pick any of 80+ U.S. Census indicators — income, poverty, housing, jobs, education, health coverage, demographics, and more — and the whole state shades county by county so you can see where a measure runs high or low at a glance.
  • Hover a county for its value, or click it for a plain-language explanation and a link to that county’s full profile in the Cost of Living County Data explorer.
  • We also made the Census metric names clearer everywhere they appear — for example, “Median household income” now reads plainly against “Average household income.”
July 21, 2026

Cost of Living: county snapshot

  • The Cost of Living calculator now shows a “County snapshot” for the county you pick — poverty rate, the share of people on public insurance, the uninsured rate, and unemployment, straight from the U.S. Census.
  • It also shows housing cost burden: the share of renters and homeowners paying 30% or more of their income on housing.
July 21, 2026

Heat Map: State House & Senate districts

  • The Heat Map now has statewide Alabama State Senate and State House district overlays you can toggle on, plus a “Fit to Alabama” button to frame the whole state.
  • Clicking a district highlights it on the map, and you can now lock a selection so an accidental click won’t clear it.