Know where every candidate stands before you mark your ballot.

How this guide was built

• The candidate list is the City of London’s certified list (nominations closed Aug 21, 2026), including withdrawals.
• We read every candidate’s campaign website and their answers to the London Decides, London Free Press, London Chamber of Commerce, CCAL and Hikma questionnaires, plus news coverage and the City’s newsroom.
• Incumbents’ recorded council votes come from council minutes, as compiled by London Decides.
• Debates: we indexed two mayoral debates (Rogers TV, Sept 16, and 980 CFPL / London Decides, Oct 2) and the Urban League meetings for all 14 wards. In the mayoral debates we matched each answer to its speaker by hand, using the moderator’s hand-offs. In the ward meetings we matched each answer to the candidate named in Rogers TV’s on-screen caption, which we read from the video every two seconds and checked by eye. What the moderator and audience said stays searchable by meeting. For Wards 2, 3, 4, 5, 13 and 14, YouTube’s captions failed because of a stereo fault in the uploads, so we transcribed the audio ourselves with the open-source Whisper speech-recognition model. Machine transcripts contain errors, and speaker matching can slip by a sentence at hand-offs, so check the video before quoting anyone. Last checked October 6, 2026.
• Interviews: the Rights and Responsibilities Awareness Initiative (RRAI) interviewed six mayoral candidates one-on-one. We transcribed the videos with Whisper and kept only the candidates’ answers, each linked to its moment in the video.
• Social media: we searched the Facebook and X accounts that candidates link from their campaign sites (36 Facebook pages, 11 X accounts) for posts about Muslims, Islamophobia, mosques and Gaza. Posts count toward a rating only when they state a position. Greetings, visits and shares that state no position are shown as “Engaged, no stated position” so you can judge them yourself.
• The four community topics (Islamophobia, Gaza, family-sized housing, faith accommodation) are rated by hand, and only from things the candidate actually said or did. We never infer a stance from someone’s background or affiliations.
• The other topics show the candidate’s own words, with “our reading”: a rating against a yardstick for that topic, assigned by AI from the quotes. Ratings a person has checked say so; the rest are marked as not yet checked. Open a cell to see the quotes and the yardstick, or switch “Our readings” off to see the quotes alone. For school trustees, a few community-topic cells carry one too, marked the same way.
• Jobs and the local economy, access to doctors and ERs, and council pay and accountability were added after community members suggested them. Their input also broadened the safety, transit, parks and housing topics.
• “No public statement found” means we looked and found nothing. It does not mean the candidate disagrees.
• This guide is nonpartisan and endorses no one. Photos come from the candidates’ own sites or their submitted London Free Press survey photos.

Researched September 30, 2026. Candidates post new statements all the time, so check their links before you vote.