Privacy and your choices.
Your candidate selections, search text, and neighbourhood filter stay in the current browser session. The straw poll and the weekly email, both described below, are the exceptions. Our Google Analytics events do not include these values.
Finding your elections
The postal code you type on the elections page is sent to voche.me, and from there to the Represent service run by Open North, which returns the city. voche.me keeps that answer for a month, filed under the postal code, so the same lookup is not repeated. It does not keep who asked, and it does not save the postal code anywhere else. Our analytics events do not include it.
Optional analytics
On our hosted site, analytics is on by default. The Analytics preferences control in the footer lets you decline it. If you decline, these services stay unloaded. We store your choice in your browser so it applies on later visits and you can change it at any time.
Google Analytics measures page visits, selected interactions, and referral sources. We remove query strings and page fragments from page-view locations and disable Google signals and advertising personalization.
Microsoft Clarity records page interactions, such as scrolling and clicks, unless you decline. The recording includes the published page text you see, which is the same text anyone can read on the site. What you type into a form field or pick from a drop-down is hidden from the recording. We deny advertising storage. These services receive network and device information as part of their requests and may use analytics cookies unless you decline.
Declining saves your choice and reloads the page to remove the loaded scripts. Information already sent to a provider before you declined stays with that provider. Analytics remains disabled on local development addresses.
Forms and external links
When you send a message through the contact form, the inaccuracy report form, or a candidate’s question form, the editors receive what you typed together with technical details of the request: your IP address and the approximate location it points to, your browser and device, the page you sent it from, the first page you opened on this visit and the site or campaign link that brought you here. A question submitted on a candidate’s page also names that candidate, so the editors can send it to the campaign. They use these only to reply to you, to reach the candidate, and to check a report. The site serves its fonts and images from the same host. Following a link to another website is subject to that website’s privacy practices. The hosting provider may record request information in server logs.
Mayoral straw poll
The straw poll popup asks which mayoral candidate you would pick. Choosing a name does not count anything by itself. We ask for your email address, send one link to it, and count your vote when you open that link. When the link is sent, the editors receive their own email with your address and the candidate you picked, together with your IP address and the approximate location it points to, your browser and device, the page you picked from, the first page you opened on this visit and the site or campaign link that brought you here. That email reaches their mailbox whether or not you open the link. An unopened link is deleted after 24 hours, and nothing is counted.
When your vote is counted we keep your email address, the candidate you picked, the date, and a random code your browser made. We keep the address so that each address counts once and so that you can change your pick later, which moves your vote instead of adding a second one. To decide whether two addresses are one inbox we ignore anything after a “+” in the part before the @, and for Gmail addresses we also ignore dots. We do not send you anything else, and we do not pass your address to a candidate, a campaign, or anyone else.
On November 16, 2026, 30 days after voting day, the poll deletes every email address, every browser code and every unopened link it holds. The totals stay, with the number of votes that were confirmed by email. The editors delete the poll emails in their mailbox on the same day: these pick emails, the blind copies of link emails an earlier version sent them, and the vote notices.
The poll takes part from within Canada, so before we send your link we read the country your internet connection appears to be in, which Cloudflare works out from your IP address. That country is used to accept or refuse the pick. The poll keeps no record of it, and it appears in the editors' email described above. It describes the connection, not you: a connection outside Canada is refused even if you live in Vancouver, which can happen on a VPN or a work network.
To stop one connection from sending confirmation emails to other people, we keep a count of how many were asked for from your connection today, stored against a scrambled form of your IP address that cannot be turned back into the address. Your IP address also limits how many requests one connection can send in a minute, and neither of those records keeps the address itself.
An earlier version of this poll also sent the editors an email for each confirmed vote. It named the candidate you picked and the address you confirmed with, together with your IP address and the approximate location it points to, your browser and device, the page you confirmed from, the first page you opened on this visit and the site or campaign link that brought you here. The poll no longer sends that email. The ones already sent stay in the editors’ mailbox until the deletion date above and are not part of the published results.
The published results show totals for each candidate. They never show an address, and no page on this site lists who voted for whom. The total also includes votes cast before this poll asked for an address, which were counted on the browser code alone; every result says how many of the total were confirmed by email. Your browser remembers your pick, so the popup stops opening by itself. Clearing your browser storage removes that memory, and the vote already counted stays in the total. Surveys with a method and a margin of error are on the polls page.
The weekly email
When you sign up for the weekly news email, we send one email to the address you typed, with a link, and a blind copy of it to the editors’ mailbox. Your address goes on our list only when you open that link and press the button on the page it opens. If you never do, we do not write again.
When you press the button, your address and the place you chose go on our list at Resend, the company that sends our email. The editors receive an email with your address, the place, the time you pressed the yes button, the time you confirmed, the words you agreed to, your IP address and the approximate location it points to, your browser and device, the page you signed up on, the first page you opened on this visit and the site or campaign link that brought you here. We keep that email as the record of your yes, because Canada’s anti-spam law makes the sender prove that you agreed.
We send one email a week, with links to the stories we published about that place. Every email has a link to unsubscribe. When you unsubscribe, Resend keeps your address marked as unsubscribed, so the weekly email stops going to it. To have the address deleted as well, ask through the contact form. We do not pass your address to a candidate, a campaign, or anyone else. Your IP address limits how many sign-ups one connection can send in a minute, and that limit keeps no record of the address.
Your browser remembers that you signed up, so the sign-up bar and pop-up stop showing. Clearing your browser storage removes that memory and leaves you on the list.
Who is responsible, and how to ask
The editor of voche.me is responsible for how this site handles personal information under British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act. Reach the editor through the contact form. You can ask what personal information we hold about you and ask us to correct it. If you are not satisfied with the answer, you can complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (opens in a new tab).
Publication details
Candidate profiles are researched editorial content, and voting locations come from the City of Vancouver's own open data. Ask for the operator's contact details through the contact form.