The Public Ledger covers every candidate contesting the 2026 Victorian state election on Saturday, 28 November — all 88 Legislative Assembly districts and all 8 Legislative Council regions. Major party, minor party, and independent candidates are profiled against the same schema and held to the same depth standard, so a thin profile reflects thin public information, never thin editorial interest. Existing coverage of candidates tends to fail voters in predictable ways — it favours the parties with press offices, it reads as press release or attack line, and it isn’t built for anyone who wants substance without wading through a wire-service archive. This project exists to be the opposite on all three counts.
Every claim on every profile is sourced and tagged claim-by-claim, not summarised into a single vague “Sources” line at the bottom of the page. A V mark means the claim is independently verifiable against a primary record; S means it’s self-stated by the candidate or campaign; R means it comes from third-party reporting that hasn’t been independently checked. Every one of those tags resolves to a specific, dated citation in that profile’s source register, so you can trace exactly how we know what we say we know — and follow it back to the original record yourself. The design is deliberately free of any party-associated colour, for the same reason: nothing about how a profile looks should signal an editorial lean.
The goal is simple: help voters form their own informed, unbiased view of who’s running in their seat, without relying on a party’s own framing of itself or a single news cycle’s worth of coverage. That means going deeper than headlines to track actual platform positions and track records, not slogans, and it means giving voters a structured, dated record they can hold candidates to after the election, not just before it. Research is a living process — profiles carry a “last verified” date and are revisited as the campaign moves, right through to polling day.