Evidence before confidence.
How a city leadership record gets into CivicGrid, how it is checked, and what the dates on each profile mean.
Find each city's official source
For every city we look for the official page that names its leader, starting from the city's own website. Candidate sites must be government domains (.gov or .state.us) or show clear signs of being a municipal site, and must name the right state. Same-name cities in different states are a known trap, so the state is checked on every page.
Not every city has a findable leadership page. Some sites block automated access and some towns have no mayor at all. Those cities stay listed; their profiles say what is missing.
Check the page, not the web
A check fetches the official page and skips it if nothing meaningful changed since the last check. Otherwise a language model running on our own hardware reads the page and returns the officeholder's name. The name must appear word for word on the page, or it is thrown away. The model never decides what gets published.
A reviewer decides what changes
When a check finds a different name or title, it creates a finding, not a change. Findings go to a restricted review queue that shows the current record, the proposed one, and the source side by side. A reviewer then accepts it, corrects it, dismisses it, or asks for the source to be re-checked.
Every decision is written to an append-only audit log with who made it, why, and the before and after values. If the record changed while a finding was waiting, the finding can't be applied until a reviewer looks again.
Two dates, two meanings
- Last checked is when we last looked at the source, whatever happened.
- Last verified is when the published leader was last confirmed against a source, either by a matching check or by a reviewer.
A source that fails to load never counts as a verification, and it never erases a record. The previous record stays published until there is evidence to change it.
Known limits
- An official leadership page has been found for about half of the cities so far. Coverage is growing.
- Checks run in batches; a regular weekly schedule is being set up.
- Population figures are Census Bureau estimates. The release year isn't yet stored with each record.
- Party is shown only where a record already carries it. Many city offices are nonpartisan.