Eljae Terms of Use

Last updated November 6, 2026

These Terms of Use are an agreement between you and Lina about your use of Eljae, an AI assistant for California politics and government. Lina is the trade name of Joseph Linares, a sole proprietor based in San Diego, California (“Lina”, “we”, “us”). By making an account you agree to these Terms and to the Eljae Privacy Notice. If you do not agree, do not make an account.

1. What Eljae is

Eljae answers questions about California politics and government: state, county, city, school and special-district government, courts, elections and voting, ballot measures, laws and bills, who holds public office, and how government works. It is a service of Lina. It is not run by, and is not part of, any government agency, campaign, party or elected official.

2. Eljae is an AI and can be wrong

• Eljae is an automated assistant, not a person. It can be out of date, incomplete or wrong.
• It is not legal advice and it is not an official government source. For anything that matters, check the official source it points you to.
• Dates and deadlines change. Confirm your own voting deadlines with your county elections office or the California Secretary of State.
• You are responsible for what you do with an answer.

3. Eljae is nonpartisan

Eljae does not tell anyone how to vote and does not endorse or oppose any candidate, party or ballot measure. For a ballot measure it explains what a YES vote and a NO vote do and summarizes the official arguments for and against. It does not give opinions of its own on them.

4. Your account

• You sign in with your email address and a one-time code we send you. There is no password. Keep your email account secure: anyone who can read your email can sign in as you.
• You must be at least 13 to use Eljae. If you are under 18, you need a parent or guardian to agree to these Terms for you before you buy Plus.
• One person per account. Do not share your account or sell access to it.
• Tell us at support@linasystems.org if you think someone else is using your account.

5. Free and Plus, and the usage limits

• Free has a daily usage allowance. Plus gives you 5 times that allowance every day, and a monthly cap.
• Usage is measured by the size of the AI work each answer takes (a long answer or a web search uses more than a short one). Your Account page and the chat show how much you have used, as a percentage.
• A day runs from midnight to midnight Pacific time. Your daily usage comes back at midnight, and Plus’s monthly cap at the start of the month.
• Eljae also has its own daily budget for what it spends on AI, counted on a different clock from your allowance: its day starts over at 4 pm Pacific time (5 pm in summer). When what Eljae has spent that day reaches the limit for free usage, free usage is paused until the budget starts over. Plus keeps working until a higher limit is reached; after that, members wait until the budget starts over. Usage also pauses if Eljae cannot check its budget.
• Only AI work counts toward your usage: a fixed answer, such as a question about which AI Eljae is, does not.
• The list sorter (Section 9) has its own daily limit, counted in rows of addresses, and Plus has a larger one. It comes back at midnight Pacific too.
• We may change the limits or the features. If we change the price of Plus, we tell you at least 30 days before the new price applies to you, and you can cancel before then.

6. Plus: automatic renewal

Plus is $5.00 a month. You're charged today and then every month on the same date until you cancel. Cancel any time on your Account page; Plus stays on until the end of the month you paid for. No refunds for part of a month, except where the law requires.

• Payment is handled by Stripe. We never see or keep your card number.
• When you buy Plus we email you a confirmation that repeats these terms and how to cancel.
• If a renewal payment fails, we email you a link to fix it, and Stripe may try your card again for a short time; Plus stays on while it is tried again. If it still cannot be collected, Stripe or we may cancel Plus.
• We may give Plus free to some accounts (“complimentary”). We can remove complimentary Plus at any time.

7. Canceling and deleting

• Cancel Plus on your Account page, online, any time. It stays on until the end of the month you paid for, and you are not charged again. You can undo the cancellation on the same page before that date.
• Delete your account on your Account page. Your account, and Plus with it, end right away. If you have Plus, we tell Stripe to cancel the subscription at the end of the month you paid for, so you are not charged again; there is no refund for the rest of that month, except where the law requires one. If we cannot cancel it at that moment, nothing is deleted and you can try again. Deleting removes your account, your sign-in sessions, your question counts and your conversations from Eljae’s systems; a few copies can remain, as the Privacy Notice says (Section 9). We cannot restore a deleted account.
• Refunds: none for part of a month, except where the law requires one.

8. Acceptable use

Do not use Eljae to:

• break the law, or to harass, threaten or defame anyone;
• create or spread false information about voting or elections, or to impersonate an official, a campaign or an agency;
• attack, overload, probe or get around the limits of the service, or collect its answers in bulk with automated tools;
• type other people’s private information, such as a name, a phone number or an ID, into a conversation with Eljae (a list of addresses belongs in the list sorter, Section 9, and nowhere else);
• resell Eljae or build a competing service from its answers.

We can limit, suspend or end an account that breaks these rules or puts the service or other people at risk.

9. The list sorter

The list sorter places a file of addresses into California districts. The file is read in your browser and is not stored by Eljae; the rows' street, city and ZIP are sent through Eljae to the U.S. Census Bureau's address lookup, and Eljae keeps only a count of the rows you sorted each day. See the Privacy Notice.

• Use it only for a list you are allowed to have, and use the results only for election, political, scholarly, journalistic or governmental purposes. California law limits what voter information can be used for (Elections Code section 2194), makes misusing it a crime (section 18109), and does not allow it to be sent outside the United States (section 2188.5): do not use the sorter from outside the United States or give a list or its results to anyone outside it. Eljae’s servers and the Census Bureau’s address lookup are in the United States.
• Do not use it to harass, threaten or intimidate anyone, to sell or give the list to someone else, or for any commercial purpose other than campaign or election work.
• You are responsible for your list and for how you use the sorted results. Eljae does not check where a list came from, and it can place an address in the wrong district or fail to place it: check any district you act on with your county elections office.
• The race numbers shown beside each district are unofficial until they are certified.

10. Your questions and our service

You own what you type. You give Lina permission to keep it, process it with the AI providers named in the Privacy Notice, and show it to Lina’s staff (including in an alert to Lina’s owner when Eljae cannot answer a question), to run Eljae, keep it safe, give you support and check and improve the quality of its answers. We do not sell your questions and we do not use them to train AI models. Eljae, its software and its look belong to Lina. You may use an answer for your own purposes.

11. No warranty, and limits on our liability

Eljae is provided “as is” and “as available”, without promises that it will be accurate, always on or error-free. To the fullest extent California law allows, Lina is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for decisions you make from an answer, and its total liability for any claim about Eljae is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim (or $50 if you paid nothing). Nothing in these Terms limits a liability that the law does not allow to be limited, or takes away a right the law gives you as a consumer.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. We will post the new version here with its date, and for a material change we will tell you by email or on the site at least 30 days before it applies to you. If you keep using Eljae after that, you accept the new version; if you do not agree, delete your account. The version you accept when you make your account, and the time you accept it, are recorded with your account. The current version is eljae+terms+privacy:2026-11-06.

13. California law and disagreements

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If you have a disagreement with us, please write to legal@linasystems.org first and give us 30 days to work it out. If that does not settle it, either of us may bring it in the state or federal courts located in San Diego County, California, or in small-claims court if it qualifies. This does not take away any right you have to bring a claim where the law says you may.

14. Contact

Questions about Eljae or these Terms: support@linasystems.org. Legal notices: legal@linasystems.org. Lina is the trade name of Joseph Linares, a sole proprietor based in San Diego, California.