The top candidate from the great state of the internet is Bernie Sanders, according to an analysis of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates’ campaign platforms by tech policy activists at the Free Press Action Fund. The worst candidate on policy positions that affect citizens’ digital lives? Donald J Trump.

While nearly all the candidates have been a little light on policy so far, they have all opined on the internet. In October, for example, a video surfaced of Ted Cruz stammering through an answer about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), a bill deplored by privacy advocates which passed the Senate less than a week later (like the rest of the Republican hopefuls in the Senate, Cruz did not vote on it).

Cruz admitted he hadn’t “studied” the bill – now it turns out he, along with all the other candidates for president, was being graded.

“We’ve been scouring the transcripts of the debates produced by the networks that host them,” said Tim Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press Action Fund. “We’ve gone through the candidates’ websites to see if there’s anything that relates to the issues in their campaign platforms, and we’ve been bird-dogging.”

Indeed, the group’s staffers have been attending stump speeches, rallies and other public events to ask the specific policy questions that, across the board, the candidates don’t seem prepared to answer.

No candidate from either party has supported strong encryption.

The issues at hand are pressing: censorship, industry consolidation and mass surveillance are among policy positions Free Press opposes. The group is in favor of net neutrality, strong encryption, inexpensive internet access and local broadband competition.

The candidates and their stances on government censorship of the internet. Photograph: Free Press Action Fund

Trump hasn’t weighed in at all on complex policy topics like cable provider consolidation or public programs to enable internet access, but everywhere he has offered comment, it’s been to the disappointment of Free Press analysts. He is generally against reforming the Patriot Act, in favor of censorship, opposed to Apple’s appeal of the FBI’s order to weaken iPhone security and has seemed to believe that net neutrality would “target conservative media”.

But simple ignorance is a problem that crosses party lines, said Karr, and it’s an acute one in a country where net neutrality and anti-surveillance activism have crossed those lines as well. “We think that there’s a constituency out there, what we call the internet voter, that has already demonstrated his or her passion on this issue,” Karr said.

“More than 10 million people got involved protesting the Pipa [the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act] and Sopa [the Stop Online Piracy Act] legislation,” he said.

“The candidates by and large haven’t caught up with this new constituency.”

The encryption issue notwithstanding, Sanders is the major exception; Hillary Clinton got low marks on surveillance and censorship, though she is still preferable to all her Republican opponents, according to the group. “You’re going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, etc,” she is quoted as saying on the topic of censorship. “But if we truly are in a war ... we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating.”

There are scattered exceptions across the Republican spectrum: Cruz was one of just four US senators to support the rollback of surveillance measures in the Patriot Act, and Rubio backed legislation to expand internet access.

But overall, Karr said, he thought the Republican refusal to break ranks on tech policy was far out of step with the electorate. “Senators Cruz and Rubio both added their names to a bill that would rescind the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality ruling, but they tend to ignore polling data that shows that net neutrality has broad bipartisan support,” Karr said. “In fact, a majority of people who identify as Republican voters say they support the principles of net neutrality.

“There’s a difference between what these politicians are saying and what their voting base believes.”