Who is providing this

Free State Tracker

Free State Tracker is published by Free State Research, a Kansas research firm. We build tools that read the public record of an election and put it where people can see it.

What this is

A standing watch on what is being bought in a Kansas election, and on the conditions the election is being fought in. It refreshes itself every hour, on its own, without anybody deciding what is interesting that day.

Everything on the public site is drawn from records that are already public. Nothing a campaign told us in confidence appears here, and nothing we were hired to find out for a client appears here.

What it is not

It is not a poll, and it is not a prediction. It reports what advertisers bought and what the record shows. Where a figure is an estimate or a floor rather than a count, the page says so.

Not authorized by, paid for by, or coordinated with any candidate, campaign or committee. Free State Research works for clients, and a reader should assume the firm has commercial interests in Kansas politics. That is exactly why the public site carries the record and not our opinion of it.

When we are wrong

Some of this is matched by machine and some of it is read out of scanned paper, so some of it is wrong. If you can see something we have got wrong — an ad attributed to the wrong buyer, a figure that does not match a filing you have in front of you — tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.

Press and researchers

You are welcome to use what is here, with attribution to Free State Tracker. If you want the underlying records behind a number, or a cut of the data we do not publish, ask. freestateresearch.com