Cookies
The short version: we set a handful of first-party cookies to run the site, exactly one optional cookie to remember your county, and nothing else. No advertising cookies, no tracking cookies, no third-party cookies. Our page analytics (Vercel Analytics) is cookieless and aggregate — it cannot follow you anywhere.
Essential — the site does not work without these
| authjs.session-token | Keeps you signed in after a magic link. Without it, no account, no profile, no member surfaces. |
| authjs.csrf-token · authjs.callback-url | Sign-in security — they exist so a sign-in can’t be forged or misdirected. |
| thedems_review_access · thedems_preview_access | Staff-only tokens that unlock the review queues and preview mode. Set only when a reviewer signs in with the access link; they do nothing for anyone else. |
| thedems_cookies | Remembers the choice you make on this page, so we don’t keep asking. |
Preference — the one that’s your call
| thedems_home | Remembers the county page you visited so the homepage can land you back on its turnout deep dive next time. It holds only the public page path (like TN/DavidsonCo) — never your address, never coordinates — and it is never written to our database. Decline it and the site works identically; you just land on the national map. |
Not cookies, but stored on your device
Two features keep a short note in your browser’s own storage rather than in a cookie. Neither is ever sent to our servers, and neither holds anything about who you are. We list them because this page is meant to be the whole inventory of what we put on your device, not just the cookie part.
| thedems_return_trail | Powers the “back to where you were” link that appears after you follow a link out of a long page. It holds the page you left, its title, and the heading of the section you were reading. It lives in sessionStorage and is erased the moment you close the tab. |
| thedems_fund_banner_dismissed_until · thedems_page_views | The two numbers behind the “help pay for this site” strip: a count of how many pages you have opened, so we don’t ask on your first visit, and the date your dismissal runs out if you press Not now. Dismissing means dismissed for about four months, across tabs — which is the only reason the date is stored at all. Neither number is tied to you, and neither leaves your browser. |
What we deliberately do not have
No advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, ever. No third-party cookies — donations run on Stripe’s own checkout page, on Stripe’s own domain, under Stripe’s own policies. If we ever add anything analytics-shaped that sets a cookie, it will appear on this page as opt-in-first before it ships. (One developer-only cookie, thedems_dev_switcher, exists on the development site and is inert and unset on thedems.org.)