Keynote: Developing a Comparison Tool to Cover Election

Facilitated by Jeanette Marié (Komune Media, France) How can independent media help citizens navigate an election without reducing political choice to rankings, polls, or simplified scores? Komune is building a comparison tool for the 2027 French presidential election that holds about 30 candidates against more than 200 laws, decrees and parliamentary texts. For each one, it sets what a candidate promises today beside what they actually did: how they voted, which amendments they filed, what they did in office. Every claim is sourced to a named document : a roll-call vote, a floor debate, a published programme. That confrontation is where the work gets difficult. A candidate who voted one way in 2021 and another in 2026 may have changed their mind and said so, which is coherent. Another may have changed their vote while keeping the same discourse, which is not. Only the promise-versus-action comparison makes that difference visible. This keynote will present how we built the tool and the editorial rules that hold it together: how we choose a reference vote when a text crossed both chambers nine times, what we write when a candidate has never spoken on a subject, and why we say so rather than infer. Readers see what is documented, what is still being verified, and how each conclusion was reached. The tool also offers several ways in, by candidate, by issue, or by starting from a situation in the reader's own life. Technology makes this possible at scale. It does not make it true. We will discuss what we learned about keeping a data product accountable to journalistic standards — including the mistakes we made, and what caught them.