Terms of Service

Quick summary

• Ledger is a nonpartisan civic tool that helps US voters understand what's on their ballot. Ledger doesn't endorse candidates, campaigns, or parties.
• You need to be 18 and a US resident to use Ledger, and you're responsible for keeping your account safe.
• Ledger's AI can be wrong. Treat its answers as a starting point, not legal, voting, or campaign-finance advice — verify with official sources.
• You own what you put in. Ledger doesn't use your quiz answers, chat history, or mock ballot to train AI models.
• Don't use Ledger to attack candidates, harass people, or try to jailbreak the AI into partisan output. Those are grounds for account suspension.
• Material changes to these Terms trigger an email and a re-consent prompt on your next login.

1. About Ledger

Ledger is operated by Ledger, Inc. (placeholder — entity formation pending; the final legal name, state of incorporation, and registered-agent address will appear here once finalized). You can reach Ledger at /contact.

At Alpha v0.1, Ledger covers US federal elections (President, Senate, House). State and local coverage ships in later phases. If you're outside the United States, Ledger isn't designed for you and Ledger doesn't onboard non-US users.

2. Eligibility

To use Ledger you must be:

• At least 18 years old. Ledger is not designed for children and Ledger does not knowingly collect information from users under 18.
• A legal resident of the United States. Ledger's data sources (FEC, state SOS, etc.) and compliance posture (CCPA as national floor) assume US residency.
• Signing up for one account per person. Duplicate accounts, bot accounts, and impersonation accounts are not permitted.

3. Your account

You can sign up with an email address and a password, in which case Ledger will email you a 6-digit code to verify ownership of the address. You can also sign in on return visits using a 6-digit code emailed to you instead of a password. Google OAuth may be offered as an optional alternative when enabled.

You are responsible for keeping your account credentials confidential. If you believe someone else has accessed your account, change your password and contact Ledger at /contact.

You can delete your account at any time from your profile. Deletion purges your address, quiz history, chat transcripts, mock ballot, and any live share links — see the Privacy Policy for the full list.

4. Acceptable use

Ledger is built around neutrality, factual accuracy, and civic utility. When you use the product you agree not to:

• Try to jailbreak the AI to produce partisan endorsements, defamatory statements about candidates, slurs, or election-related disinformation. Ledger's AI is instructed to refuse these requests; attempting to work around that is a breach of these Terms.
• Scrape, systematically copy, or reverse-engineer Ledger's data, UI, or APIs. Access Ledger through the interface Ledger provides. Rate limits are enforced and documented in the Privacy Policy.
• Impersonate candidates, campaigns, elected officials, other users, or Ledger staff.
• Upload sensitive personal information beyond what Ledger requests. Ledger asks for an address to look up your ballot, and for quiz answers and chat messages. Ledger does not ask for government IDs, health data, financial data, or voter-file data — and Ledger doesn't want them.
• Harass other users or political figures through shareable artifacts, chat content, or any other surface the product provides.
• Circumvent rate limits, auth flows, or any technical measures Ledger uses to keep the service running fairly for everyone.
• Use Ledger to send spam, distribute malware, or coordinate attacks on any system.

Violations can result in warning, throttling, suspension, or permanent termination of your account, at Ledger's discretion.

5. AI output disclaimer

Ledger uses an AI chat feature (built on Anthropic's Claude models today, with a long-range plan to move to a Ledger-curated open-weight model) to answer your questions about candidates, ballot measures, and the offices on your ballot.

AI output can be inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, or taken out of context. Ledger cites sources for every substantive claim, but Ledger cannot guarantee the correctness of the underlying sources or the AI's synthesis of them. You are responsible for verifying anything that matters to you with official sources (the FEC, your Secretary of State, the candidate's own campaign materials, the actual text of the ballot measure, etc.).

Ledger's AI output is not:

• Legal advice.
• Voting advice ("who should I vote for"). Ledger answers questions factually and presents multiple framings; Ledger doesn't tell you how to vote.
• Campaign-finance advice.
• A substitute for consulting an election official when your ballot, registration, or eligibility is in question.

If Ledger's AI produces a response that feels biased, inaccurate, or harmful, please report it through /contact — Ledger takes these reports seriously. For the editorial rules governing how Vera answers questions — neutrality standards, sourcing, refusal posture — see the AI Policy.

6. Your content

You retain ownership of what you put into Ledger: your quiz answers, your mock-ballot selections, your chat messages, and anything you author in shareable artifacts.

Limited license to operate the service. By using Ledger you grant Ledger a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, process, and display your content solely to run the service for you — for example, showing your saved ballot when you log back in, or rendering a shareable quiz card that you explicitly chose to share.

Ledger doesn't use your content to train AI models. Not Ledger's own models, not third-party models. Anthropic's no-training API posture applies to the chat traffic Ledger sends them on your behalf. If Ledger ever changes this posture, Ledger will update these Terms as a material change and ask for your re-consent on next login.

7. Shareable artifacts

Ledger lets you generate public links to things like a quiz-results card today, and — in a post-Alpha release — a mock-ballot card you've put together.

When you share an artifact:

• You are the publisher. The content is on a public URL because you chose to make it public.
• You can revoke it. Revoking the share immediately invalidates the URL and removes the public payload.
• Ledger does not endorse your selections simply because it rendered the card for you. The nonpartisan banner stays on every share page.
• The public payload contains only what's needed (a label, the axis scores, a timestamp, and, for mock-ballot shares, your selected candidates) — not your email, your address, or any other account identifier.

8. Donation link-out (post-Alpha)

In a future post-Alpha release, Ledger will add a "Donate to this candidate" link that routes you to the candidate's official donation destination — typically WinRed for Republican candidates and ActBlue for Democratic candidates, or the campaign's own site for independents and third-party candidates.

To be explicit:

• Ledger is not a payment processor. Ledger does not collect, hold, route, or refund donations.
• Your transaction is with the third-party platform and the candidate's campaign, not with Ledger. Their terms of service and privacy policy govern the transaction.
• Ledger receives no fee or compensation for routing you to a donation destination. Ledger does not earn a cut, a referral fee, or any other form of payment from campaigns or platforms.
• Ledger links to the candidate's official destination. If a candidate does not publish an official donation URL Ledger trusts, Ledger does not show the button for that candidate.

The donation link-out ships with its own visual treatment so it cannot be confused with a Ledger-branded "Donate" button. The current status of this feature is tracked in Ledger's public changelog.

9. Ledger Premium (post-Alpha)

Ledger's core product — the ballot view, the values quiz, basic AI chat, mock ballot — is and will remain free. A post-Alpha Ledger Premium subscription will gate higher-tier AI features (persistent memory, unlimited chat quotas, deeper candidate dossiers).

When Premium ships, these Terms will be updated to cover:

• Billing via Stripe. Your payment information is held by Stripe, not by Ledger. See the Privacy Policy for what Ledger stores.
• Auto-renewal. Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel.
• Cancellation. You can cancel anytime from your account settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period.
• Refund policy. To be specified when Premium launches; expected posture is pro-rated refund for the current billing period on user request.
• Entitlement resolution. Premium features are unlocked while your subscription is active; they lock again when the subscription lapses.

Until Premium ships these terms are informational and not in force.

10. Advertising (post-Alpha)

When Ledger eventually introduces ads on the free tier, the posture will be:

• Consumer-relevant, non-political ads only. No political candidate ads, no PAC ads, no issue-advocacy ads, no campaign ads. This is a hard rule derived from Ledger's Privacy Policy and not a vendor-default.
• No behavioral tracking. Contextual (page-category) targeting is acceptable; individual-user behavioral tracking is not.
• Premium is ad-free. The Premium subscription removes all ads.

Any deviation from this posture requires a material update to these Terms and re-consent on next login.

11. Account suspension and termination

Ledger may suspend or terminate your account if:

• You breach these Terms, including the acceptable-use rules in §4.
• Ledger detects fraud, abuse, or credential compromise.
• A government or legal order requires Ledger to.
• The service is wound down (in which case Ledger gives reasonable notice and provides an export path).

Serious violations (harassment, coordinated abuse, attempts to publish defamatory content via shareable artifacts) may be actioned without prior warning. For less severe issues Ledger will typically warn first.

You can also delete your account at any time. Deletion is real — the purge scope is described in the Privacy Policy. If you want a copy of your data before deletion you can request it through /contact.

Appeals. If you believe your account was suspended or terminated in error, email /contact and Ledger will review.

12. Disclaimers

Ledger is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied. Ledger aims to provide accurate election and candidate information, but:

• Ledger does not warrant the accuracy or timeliness of ballot data, candidate finance data, election-calendar dates, or any other information surfaced through the product. Public data sources (FEC, state SOS, Mapbox, etc.) are the ground truth Ledger draws from, and they have their own lag and correction cycles.
• Neutrality is a commitment, not a perfection guarantee. Ledger works hard to avoid partisan framing; Ledger also acknowledges that no AI system and no editorial process is completely free of bias. If you find a specific neutrality violation, report it via /contact and Ledger will investigate.
• Third-party links are not endorsements. When Ledger links to a candidate's official site, a news source, a donation platform, or an external reference, the link does not imply agreement with or endorsement of that destination.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Ledger and its officers, employees, and contractors will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising out of your use of the service. Ledger's total aggregate liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid to Ledger in the 12 months preceding the claim or (b) US $100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages; in those jurisdictions, Ledger's liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by law.

14. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify Ledger against claims arising from your breach of these Terms or your misuse of the service. Ledger will indemnify you against third-party intellectual-property claims targeting the Ledger service itself.

15. Dispute resolution and governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles.

Binding individual arbitration. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or your use of Ledger will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by a recognized US arbitration provider (such as the American Arbitration Association) under its consumer arbitration rules, rather than in court. The arbitration will be conducted in English and may be held remotely or, if required by the arbitrator, in your state of residence. Judgment on the arbitrator's award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Small-claims carve-out. Notwithstanding the above, either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, provided the claim qualifies under that court's rules.

Class-action waiver. To the fullest extent permitted by law, each party waives the right to bring or participate in any class, collective, or representative action. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims from multiple users and may not preside over any form of representative proceeding.

Consumer-protection floor. Nothing in this section limits any non-waivable statutory rights you have under applicable state or federal consumer-protection law.

16. Changes to these Terms

Ledger will update these Terms as the product grows. When Ledger makes a material change — anything beyond a typo fix, a clarifying sentence, or a stylistic edit — Ledger will:

1. Email you at your account address at least 7 days before the new version takes effect.
2. Display an in-product banner while the new version is pending.
3. Require re-consent on your next login after the effective date.

The legal changelog tracks every version, with prior versions available at /legal/terms/v/<version>. Continuing to use Ledger after the effective date of a new version means you accept the new version.

17. Contact

Questions, concerns, and legal notices can reach Ledger through /contact. For formal service of process, a physical notice address will appear here once Ledger's entity formation is complete.

18. Effective date and version

• Version: v1.0.0
• Effective date: April 20, 2026
• Prior versions: none (this is the first public version).

The full version history is in the legal changelog.