Responses and grades were scheduled to be published on September 20. They will now be published on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, two days later. Nothing else about the release changes. Everything still goes up at once rather than as it is finished, still organized by municipality on the scorecard, and still well ahead of general voting day, Saturday, October 17, 2026.
Why the date moved
The deadline for candidates to return the questionnaire was September 18. A large share of the responses we received arrived in the last few days before it, and a substantial number on the final day itself. That is a good outcome for the scorecard: each of those submissions is a candidate who chose to tell voters where they stand, and each one belongs on the scorecard alongside the rest.
The original schedule left two days between the cut-off and publication, which was enough for the number of last-minute responses the coalition planned for and not enough for the number that came. Every response is graded question by question against a published rubric, by the partner organization that wrote those questions, and reviewed before anything is posted. That is slower than reading, deliberately: a grade has to be one the coalition can explain and one a candidate can check against the methodology.
Two extra days is the smallest change that finishes that work without shortening it. The alternatives were worse. Publishing part of the region and filling in the rest later would leave candidates looking unresponsive when they were not, and would break the one rule the release runs on, which is that nothing appears before everything does. Grading faster would put a weaker grade under a candidate’s name during an election, which is the outcome the methodology exists to prevent.
What has not moved
The candidate cut-off is unchanged. September 18 was the last day to return the questionnaire and be graded, on this site and on anything printed, and moving the publication date does not reopen it. The two dates do different jobs: one closes the questionnaire, the other releases the results, and treating a change to the second as a change to the first would be unfair to every candidate who met the deadline as published. Candidates who missed it are still welcome to write to us, and we will note that they responded late, but a late response is not graded.
Candidates who did respond, including on the final day, are in the grading queue. The two additional days are for grading, not for a second look at who qualifies.
What to expect
Voters do not need to do anything before September 22. Until then a candidate who replied shows an hourglass rather than a letter on the scorecard, which says nothing about how that candidate’s grading is going. On release day the responses and the grades appear together, by municipality.
The project timeline has been updated, and every page that quotes the publication date now shows the new one. Anyone who wants the announcement can subscribe to the mailing list. The coalition informs; it does not endorse.
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