Glossary

Application-to-person messaging over standard 10-digit long code phone numbers. Carriers require brand and campaign registration; political messaging additionally requires an authorization token issued through Campaign Verify. Registration is the sender’s obligation, not a vendor’s.

A tag-like object in NGP VAN used to mark a person as belonging to a group or having taken an action. Ballot Signal maps page-intent signals to activist codes so a donate-page reader shows up as one in your organizers’ view. See NGP VAN.

A URL parameter supported by WinRed for attributing a donation to a referring source. Passing a visitor identifier through it links a donation back to the visit that produced it, using an official parameter rather than a workaround. See WinRed.

The California Invasion of Privacy Act. Section 631(a) underpins wiretapping claims against website trackers; section 638.51 underpins the newer pen-register theory. Both are about scripts that ran before the visitor was asked. See CIPA & website tracking.

The software that presents a consent request, records the answer, and blocks scripts until consent is granted. Ballot Signal consumes CMP state rather than replacing it — though we ship a banner for sites that have none. See consent & privacy integrations.

Google’s consent signaling framework, carrying four signals: ad_storage, analytics_storage, ad_user_data and ad_personalization. All four should default to denied in an inline head script before any tag loads.

The four fields that make consent provable: timestamp, version, source URL and granted categories. Every Ballot Signal supporter record carries all four, in every export and every push.

A version string identifying the exact consent language and policy in force when a person consented. Storing it means a policy change does not retroactively rewrite what somebody agreed to.

Resolving an unidentified website visitor into a known person. The word is doing a lot of work in this category — the question that matters is whether the visitor was asked first.

The hash of a lowercased email address, used as the join key across every destination. Matching order is dedupe key, then phone, then name plus address. See what you get.

The TCPA standard for automated text messages: an affirmative act by the person, disclosing that they agree to receive automated messages, not conditioned on purchase. A phone number on a record is not this. See TCPA & texting.

A keyed hash over a webhook’s raw request body, sent in a header, proving the payload came from us and was not altered. Verify it in constant time, and check the timestamp header to defeat replay. See universal webhook.

A commercial data set linking identifiers to people, used to resolve a consented visitor into contact fields. Distinct from a voter file, which adds registration and vote history and which we do not have. See voter file rules.

Goods or services given to a political committee below the usual and normal charge. It is why a vendor discount to a federal campaign can become a reportable — and sometimes prohibited — contribution. See FEC & in-kind.

A derived label describing what a consented visitor did — donate-page, volunteer-page, issue-page. Mapped to tags, activist codes or custom events in your destinations.

An FCC rule that would have required consent to name a single identified seller and be topically associated with the interaction. Vacated by the Eleventh Circuit in January 2025 in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC. Pre-existing prior-express-written-consent requirements still apply.

A device or process that records dialing, routing, addressing or signaling information. Recent CIPA litigation advances the theory that IP-collecting website scripts can qualify under section 638.51.

The normalized object Ballot Signal produces: contact fields, address, consent fields, intent signals, attribution and a dedupe key. One shape, every destination. See what you get.

Under 11 CFR 100.52(d)(2), the charge for services at a commercially reasonable rate prevailing at the time they were rendered. Billing a committee less can create an in-kind contribution.

A WordPress standard letting plugins read a site’s consent state through shared categories: functional, statistics-anonymous, statistics, preferences and marketing. The cleanest consent contract we integrate with. See WP Consent API.