About Who runs this

Built by a volunteer who saw the box up close.

RedBoxWatch is an independent monitoring project. It crawls the public websites of federal candidates nationwide and detects red-boxing — message guidance posted in plain sight for the super PACs that are barred from coordinating with campaigns directly. It then publishes the evidence: the archived page itself, the exact quoted spans, and the aligned outside spending that followed.

Why it exists

The site is built and maintained by Charlie Garfield, who spent 2026 as a campaign fellow in one of the most expensive House primaries ever run, where he saw the effects of red-boxing firsthand.

Voters deserve to know exactly how involved a candidate is with the outside money in their local race — not because red-boxing is unlawful, but because it is public, deliberate, and easy to miss unless someone points at it.

Who’s behind it

Charlie Garfield is a recent graduate of Davidson College with a degree in Computer Science and Sociology. He believes technology can make democracy more transparent. RedBoxWatch is unaffiliated with any campaign, party, or PAC. Findings currently skew toward Democratic campaigns because the practice historically has, while the scan covers every funded candidate of every party.

Open source

The entire pipeline of the website (minus the exact classifier prompt, withheld so red boxes cannot be written to evade it) is open source at github.com/charliegarfield/redboxwatch (AGPL‑3.0). A site that asks campaigns to work in the open should work in the open itself: the methodology can be read, checked, and re-run. Every finding published here has passed human review prior to publication; findings from other deployments of the code are not findings from RedBoxWatch.

Contact

Press and media inquiries: press [at] redboxwatch [dot] org. Candidates or representatives disputing a finding: corrections & appeals.