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How this works

SmarterVote only works if you can check it. This page explains exactly where the information comes from, how it’s summarised, what gets excluded, and where the weaknesses are. If anything here doesn’t match what you see on the site, that’s a bug — please report it.

What this site does

It puts every candidate in a race side by side on the same issues, in the same format, so you can see where they actually differ. The Town of Huntsville publishes who is running and how to reach them. It does not compare them. That gap is the only reason this site exists.

What this site does not do

Where the information comes from

The candidate list is taken from the Town of Huntsville’s certified candidate list. Nominations closed on 21 August 2026 and candidates were certified on 24 August, so that list is final.

Positions come from, in order of preference:

The rule about sources

Every published position carries a direct quote, a link to where it came from, and a date. There are no exceptions, and this isn’t a policy we try to remember — it’s enforced by the database itself. A position can only be published if it has a quote and a source, or if it is explicitly marked “no public position found”. There is no third option.

Summaries are drafted with AI assistance and constrained to restate only what the source actually says. Every one is reviewed by a person before it appears. Nothing publishes automatically.

How we quote people

Quotes are reproduced exactly as the candidate wrote or said them. We don’t tidy them up, and we don’t shorten them in ways that change their meaning.

Square brackets always mean SmarterVote added something. There are only two reasons we ever do it:

We never use brackets to change what someone meant, to soften a position, or to add commentary. Every insertion is checked against the original before it publishes, and a quote containing an unexplained bracket is treated as an error and stopped rather than published.

If you think a bracketed insertion has changed the sense of something you said, that is exactly the kind of thing the corrections process is for, and we will fix it quickly.

How much they said

Next to the link that reveals a candidate’s words, you’ll sometimes see a note in brackets — (a page or more), (one sentence), (reported remarks). That describes the source we took the position from, so you can tell a worked-out plan from a passing mention without opening every quote.

It is not a score. There is no colour, no icon, no rating out of five, and the notes are not ranked against each other. We thought about a filled-in dot or a green-to-amber scale and decided against it: a visual scale is a rating, and this one would rate candidates on how much they wrote — which says more about who has a web designer than about who has thought hardest. A single clear sentence can be a better answer than five vague paragraphs.

Length notes are only ever used for words a candidate published themselves, where they chose how much to write. When a position comes from a news article or a public meeting we say (reported remarks) and give no length at all, because there the length was a reporter’s decision, not the candidate’s. Marking a candidate short because a journalist quoted two sentences of them would punish the very candidates who have no website — precisely the unfairness described below.

Where you see no note, it means we haven’t recorded one yet. It doesn’t mean anything about the candidate.

When the source is a news article

A news story mixes two different things: words the candidate actually said, inside quotation marks, and the reporter’s summary of what they said. Those are not the same, and we don’t treat them as if they were.

Only words a reporter put inside quotation marks and attributed to the candidate ever appear here as that candidate’s quote. Where an article reports a position but doesn’t quote it — “she also said she would review the budget process” — that appears in our summary, plainly as our summary, never in quotation marks beside their name.

This is why some candidates have fewer positions here than a full reading of their coverage might suggest. If a position was only ever paraphrased, we have nothing we can honestly print as their words, so we print nothing and keep looking. We also don’t stitch two separate quotations together into one sentence the candidate never spoke.

Comments posted below news articles are not used, even when the name on the comment matches a candidate’s. A name on a comment form isn’t verification.

Links to candidates’ own pages

Where we link to a candidate’s campaign website, that address comes from the Town’s certified candidate list.

We do not guess social media links. The Town publishes social media as free text — sometimes a username, sometimes just a page name — and those are not web addresses. Turning them into addresses means guessing, and a wrong guess doesn’t produce a broken link; it points a candidate’s name at a stranger who happens to share it. A handle on the Town’s list is shown here as plain text, exactly as the Town published it, and never as a link.

A social account becomes a link in only two situations:

What we never do is build an address out of a name or a handle and assume it lands in the right place.

Names repeat, and a page belonging to someone who shares a candidate’s name is not that candidate’s page. If you ever find a link here that goes somewhere it shouldn’t, please tell us — that gets fixed the same day.

The fairness problem, stated plainly

Ten of the 28 candidates have campaign websites. Eighteen don’t. Nine have neither a website nor a listed social account.

A site that only summarises what candidates published would quietly punish whoever didn’t build a website — which in practice tends to mean first-time, older and less-resourced candidates. That would be a real bias, introduced by a tool claiming to remove bias. So:

This is the weakest part of the site and we’d rather say so than let you discover it.

Corrections

Anyone can report a correction, and candidates get priority. Every correction is logged, reviewed by a person, and answered. Corrections received during the voting period are treated as urgent — a wrong fact while people are actively voting is the worst thing that can happen here.

Election advertising rules

Ontario’s Municipal Elections Act, 1996 regulates third-party advertising, which it defines as advertising that promotes, supports or opposes a candidate. The Province’s own guidance further states that advertising about an issue rather than a candidate is not third-party advertising.

SmarterVote promotes, supports and opposes nobody. It presents what candidates have said about issues, with sources, and makes no recommendation. On that basis we understand it to fall outside the definition of third-party advertising, and SmarterVote is not registered as a third-party advertiser. We’re setting that reasoning out publicly so it can be checked rather than assumed. If the Town Clerk or any reader believes we’ve got this wrong, please tell us and we will act on it.

Accessibility

The site targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA and is built to meet Ontario’s AODA requirements. If something here is hard to use with a screen reader, a keyboard, or at high zoom, that’s a defect — please report it and it will be fixed.

Who runs this

One Huntsville resident, unpaid, with no funding, no advertising and no affiliation. See About.

For official information, go to the Town

This is an independent site. For anything official — registering to vote, how to vote, deadlines, results — always use huntsville.ca.