Methodology & editorial standards
CNMI Politics is designed to make the provenance of a statement visible instead of flattening every source into the same kind of fact.
Evidence labels
Primary record confirmed means a court opinion, statute, official filing, certified election record, audit, agency document or equivalent primary source supports the statement. Published record confirmed means identified reporting supports it. Analysis is an inference or editorial judgment drawn from identified facts. A charge, accusation, audit exception, dismissal, acquittal, reversal or vacatur keeps its own procedural meaning.
Election data
CEC’s current certified candidate listing controls the launch roster. An older CEC page showing 78 candidates remains publicly accessible but is treated as stale. Pre-election vote figures exposed on a CEC results endpoint are excluded from factual election reporting until actual results exist.
Candidate coverage
Candidate claims are presented as candidate claims. Record checks can be favorable, unfavorable or inconclusive. Senior incumbency and institutional authority are relevant context when a candidate campaigns on reform of the institution in which that candidate already exercises authority.
Corrections
Material factual corrections should identify what changed, when it changed and why. Quietly rewriting a material factual error is not the preferred practice.
Research archive
The launch package includes a 300-row newspaper/OCR candidate-match file supplied from the local CNMI research corpus. Those rows are machine-indexed research leads, not 300 individually verified articles about the named candidate. Public-facing analysis relies on individually reviewed sources.