Elections Policy

The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/elections · Effective October 16, 2026

An election is the record's highest-stakes civic assignment. This page states how The Massachusetts Times covers one — the mechanics citizens vote by, the claims candidates make, the counts that decide it, and the discipline that holds through the loudest week of public life. Every sentence here is kept today.

1. The Duty

1.1. Election coverage here serves the voter before it serves the spectacle. The ballot's contents, the rules for casting it, and the verified record of those who seek office are covered as civic infrastructure — the part of the news a citizen acts on directly.

1.2. Every firewall this library builds stands tallest here: no endorsements under the Editorial Policy, no political advertising under the Advertising Policy, and no political activity at the desk under the Gifts, Travel and Political Activity Policy. This page governs the coverage those walls protect.

2. Equality of Scrutiny

2.1. Candidates are covered by one standard. Scrutiny scales with the office sought and the weight of the claim made — never with our sympathies, and never inversely to them.

2.2. No candidate's claims pass unverified because we find them congenial, and none meet manufactured storms because we don't. Our questions go to every serious candidate; our corrections door is open to all of them equally, as the Accountability Policy already guarantees everyone.

3. The Mechanics Lane

3.1. Voting mechanics — dates, deadlines, registration, polling places, ballot content, the rules for a lawful vote — are verified against the official source, carry their verification dates in public as the Verification Policy requires, and are kept current through the cycle.

3.2. An error in voting mechanics is the gravest class of correction this publication recognizes: it can disenfranchise, so it moves to the front of all work, ahead of everything, and the correction chases the error down every channel it traveled.

4. Claims in Campaigns

4.1. A campaign claim is a claim: tested under the Verification Policy, established, contested, or refused under the Record Policy's grammar, exactly like any other assertion in our pages.

4.2. We do not launder falsehood by quoting it neutrally. Where the evidence settles that a claim is false, the work says so, plainly, beside the claim, every time the claim appears.

4.3. We do not manufacture equivalence the evidence does not hold. Evenhandedness here is the equality of Section 2 — one standard, applied identically — never the arithmetic averaging of claims. When the evidence is asymmetric, the coverage is asymmetric, and the evidence is the reason.

5. Polls

5.1. A poll we publish carries its anatomy in public: who conducted it, who paid for it, when it ran, the sample, and the margin of error — stated where the numbers are, not in a footnote beyond them.

5.2. A poll is weather, not a result, and it is written as weather. We commission no horse-race theater, and a sponsor's interest in a poll's finding is disclosed as the Conflicts of Interest Policy would demand of any interested evidence.

6. Counts Over Calls

6.1. This publication reports counted results from official sources, dated and sourced. We do not project winners.

6.2. A race is won in our pages when the count makes it so, or when a concession and the count together make it so. If we ever carry another organization's projection, it is labeled as a projection, named to its maker, and never dressed as a result.

6.3. We would rather be the last publication in America to say who won and the only one that never had to retract it. That preference is this library's oldest law — withholding over guessing — applied to its most public test.

7. Election Night and After

7.1. Partial counts are labeled partial, with what remains outstanding stated beside them — which ballots, from where, roughly how many — so a moving count surprises no reader of ours.

7.2. Post-election claims of fraud or irregularity are covered by the evidence standard: specific claims tested specifically, findings stated plainly in either direction, and the genuinely unsettled held as contested under the Record Policy's grammar — never served as settled in anyone's favor, never buried to avoid the trouble.

8. The Permanent Campaign Record

8.1. Our archive makes a campaign checkable forever: what a candidate promised, claimed, and said in our pages is a dated, permanent, citable record under the Archive and Permanence Terms, and officeholders are covered against it.

8.2. Outcomes, once official, enter the record as civic facts with verification dates, and the record of who holds what office is maintained as the infrastructure it is.

9. Hosting

9.1. Any forum, debate, or candidate event this publication hosts is governed by Section 2's equality, in the invitation, the format, and the questions — we host nothing we cannot host equally.

10. The Record of This Policy

10.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so the election law governing any cycle's coverage can always be checked against that cycle.

This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.