Think of this site as a chapter house meeting that never adjourns.

Everyone running gets the same chair and the same hard questions — that’s Cal’s interviews. Every word is written down where anyone can go check it — that’s the transcripts and the quotes. Nobody’s seat is closer to the fire: the same page, the same treatment, whether they’re a former vice president or a first-time candidate — that’s the rule this whole site is built on. And the floor is open: you can speak too — the surveys, the questions you submit, the corrections you send.

So, in plain terms, we bring three things to the meeting: the facts (42 interviews, checked word for word), the tools and the education (the Academy, the guides, the yardsticks — how it all actually works), and some metrics (the surveys — the community’s own numbers, gathered as we go). Then comes the part no meeting can do for you. When the talking is done, the meeting doesn’t vote — you do. We keep the minutes. You make the decision.

We want you to know exactly where this content comes from and what its limits are, so you can weigh it honestly.

About the site: About · Our story · The bigger idea · How this site was made

The candidate summaries on this site were generated by AI from automated recordings and transcripts of Cal Nez’s long-form interviews on Politics on the Navajo Nation, then reviewed. That has three honest consequences:

• Wording is paraphrased, not exact. Unless something appears in quotation marks, it’s a summary — for a candidate’s real words, watch their interview.
• AI can make mistakes, and the recordings are imperfect. Automated transcription garbles names and drops words, so a summary may misstate or blur what was said. We fix errors as we find them. If you notice anything strange — a wrong name, a quote that doesn’t sound right, numbers that don’t add up — please email us a screenshot and tell us which page you were on (every page shows its Page ID at the very bottom).
• Cal shares his own strong views in these interviews. Where a candidate was responding to or agreeing with Cal, a summary might not always make that clear — so a view attributed to a candidate may partly reflect Cal’s framing of the question. We are auditing for this.

The Diné Civic Center is an independent, nonpartisan civic-education project run by community volunteers. It is not Cal Nez’s site: Cal Nez is an independent journalist whose public interviews are our primary source, but he is not an employee or representative of the Diné Civic Center, and the Center’s summaries, organization, and editorial choices are its own. The Center is not affiliated with any candidate, campaign, political organization, government agency, or election authority.

A limit worth naming on its own: the automated transcription works in English. When a candidate speaks in Diné Bizaad — and several do, at length — the transcript garbles it, and our AI-assisted summaries cannot capture what was said. Those passages are underrepresented here through no fault of the candidate. For anything spoken in Diné Bizaad, the interview video is the only faithful record — another reason to watch the source. The clearest cases we have found so far: Larry Noble, Germaine Simonson, Zachariah George, Melinda Arviso-Ciocco, and Darryl Bitsoi each spoke substantial portions of their interviews in Diné Bizaad — their pages carry a note, and their videos hold their fullest answers. This list may grow as review continues.

Three tiers, honestly labeled. Candidate content — profiles, summaries, quotes, the solutions library — comes from Cal Nez’s recorded interviews; every quote and claim has been checked against its transcript. Civic-education content (the Academy lessons, the reform comparison) was drafted with AI assistance from publicly available materials: the Navajo Nation Code, official publications, court decisions, and historical records. It is reviewed by volunteers but not yet line-checked against the current Code — that verification pass is planned and ongoing. What we know firsthand — and what we don’t: we are a small volunteer team, and we are not subject-matter experts in most of what this site covers. For topics like land and grazing, veterans’ services, the enterprises, ranching, government operations, and more, we rely on two things: the candidates’ own recorded words, and official documents we can check claims against. What we cannot do alone is judge whether those pages ring true to the people who live these topics every day. If you work in one of these fields — a rancher, a veteran or veterans’ service officer, a chapter official, someone inside a Nation enterprise or program — we would genuinely welcome your review of the pages that touch your world. Write to us — corrections and plain talk are both welcome. Practical guides (like filing a complaint) are working drafts pending review by an attorney or the offices involved, and are labeled as such on the page. Where the site cannot cite something precisely, it says so rather than inventing a citation.

Almost everything of substance here started as a Diné voice: forty-two candidates — from Shiprock to Ramah to Tohajiilee to Birdsprings — answering Cal Nez’s questions at length, and community members writing in with corrections and questions. Volunteers and AI tools organized those words. They did not invent them. When this site describes what the Nation asks of its leaders, it is repeating what people said on the record.

These interviews don’t expire on election day. Every candidate’s words here — their priorities, their plans, their “this is what I’ll do” — stay published after July 21, in their own voice, with the video as the permanent record.

That serves two things. It serves voters next time: when the people elected this year stand for re-election, anyone will be able to read what they promised and weigh it against what happened — no arguing over who said what. And it serves the record itself: forty-two candidates sat down and answered hard questions in public during the 2026 election. That’s a piece of Navajo Nation history, and it deserves to be kept whole.

We think this is the fairest kind of accountability there is — not a grade from us, just each candidate’s own words, kept safe, where everyone can read them.

We do not score, rank, grade, or endorse any candidate. The summaries exist to show where each candidate stands and what they propose — you decide the rest.

Please tell us: dineelectioninfo@gmail.com. Every reader who flags an error makes this resource better for the next voter.

This site was made possible by community members who care — people who had some time and chose to put their own talents and passions toward a better future here. Thank you to Cal Nez, whose interviews on Politics on the Navajo Nation are the foundation everything here stands on. And thank you to the Diné Civic Center volunteers — and to everyone who sends a correction, a question, or an idea. You are how this gets better.

One more thing, said plainly: this is the first website these volunteers have ever built. We think it turned out quite sophisticated and useful — and yes, thank you to the AI too, which did a great deal of the heavy lifting under human direction and review (the limits of that arrangement are described honestly above). That is the lesson we hope travels farther than this election: this is what’s possible with technology when ordinary people pick it up with care. We need to use it to our advantage — and get back on track.

What this site collects. Survey and quiz answers are anonymous taps; a few forms offer an optional short written line, which a volunteer reads before anything is shared publicly. The surveys never ask for your name, address, phone number, email, or account of any kind. Quiz games like Jeopardy and the Issue Prioritizer run entirely on your own screen and save nothing.

Where answers go. Form answers are stored with Netlify, the service that hosts this site. Like most websites, this site also uses Google Analytics, which collects standard, aggregated usage information (such as which pages are visited); we use it only to understand which resources help people. We do not sell or share any information with anyone, and there are no ads here.

What our numbers are and aren’t. Community tallies on this site count only the people who chose to answer. They are not a census, not a scientific survey, and not research about the Navajo people — they are a community conversation, and we label them that way wherever they appear.

Your choices. Every survey question is optional. If you submitted something and want it removed, write to the contact page and a volunteer will delete it from the form records.