About VoteBrief
The public record of San José City Council meetings: the full transcript, the votes, and plain-language summaries of what was decided. No spin, no slant — just what happened, in the open, free for anyone to use.
How vote data stays honest
When we list how each person voted, we check it against the city's official minutes first. Records we haven't verified yet are clearly marked unverified — don't quote those; check the official minutes. We never guess at names or votes. If the record doesn't say, we don't print it.
Transcripts are produced by computer from the city's public recordings and published word-for-word as spoken. Mistakes happen — if you spot one, we'll fix it openly, with a note saying what changed.
Coverage right now: San José City Council regular meetings and study sessions, 80 transcribed so far, starting November 20, 2024. Coverage grows as meetings are transcribed.
How the audio becomes a transcript
Every meeting starts as the city's own public recording. We download it and transcribe it on our own computer with open-source speech recognition. The audio never goes to a third-party service.
Then we check our work. We compared our transcripts against the city's official minutes for three full meetings, vote by vote: we caught 20 of 21 votes, and every result we reported matched the official record. Where the audio never announced a result, we said so instead of guessing.
The honest limits: computer transcription mishears names sometimes, and council votes are usually announced as "passes unanimously" with no roll call read aloud — so exact tallies and who voted which way come from the official minutes, not from us. Anything we haven't verified is marked clearly, and you can always jump from any vote straight to the moment in the recording to hear it yourself.