Methodology

Where our data comes from

You should not have to take our word for anything. Here is every source we use, what we generate, and what we can get wrong.

Primary sources

Bills, sponsors, status, actions: The Congress.gov API (Library of Congress), with full bill text from GovInfo (U.S. Government Publishing Office). Every bill page links directly to its official record so you can check us.
Roll-call votes: The official tallies published by the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate. Member names, parties, states, and positions are reproduced from those records. We do not infer, estimate, or reconstruct a vote.
A bill's status: Derived from the bill's full action history, not just its most recent action — otherwise a procedural motion can make a bill look passed when it is not. A motion to proceed, a cloture vote, or a discharge petition is never counted as passage.

Where we use AI — and where we don't

Never authoritative for primary record fields. Vote counts, who voted which way, sponsors, dates, status, and officeholders come from source records. Generated prose cannot overwrite those fields or clear a page's evidence floor.

These are the reader-visible AI pipelines currently registered in the codebase. Each generated surface must be labeled where it appears:

Federal bill summaries and key provisions — Exact-bill Congress.gov CRS summary where one exists; otherwise the bill’s own official Congress.gov text, labeled as such where it appears. Key provisions are generated only from a CRS digest. Legacy rows without the provenance tuple are withheld.
“Hidden from you” bill audits — Bounded evidence from official bill text, with evidence coverage and unverified gaps shown.
State bill summaries — Full attached bill text when available; title/description fallbacks are labeled separately.
Local measure title restatements — Authoritative Legistar title and category only; not full measure text.
Governor bill restatements and provisions — Official legislature bill text where a retained document link is available; the official bill description, acquired through Plural Open or retained historical data, only as the bounded fallback.
Executive-order explanations and key provisions — The order’s official Federal Register full text; the order record remains authoritative.
Clemency context — Stored clemency record and linked source; generated context is labeled.
Supreme Court case summaries — Stored docket record and opinion metadata from CourtListener; the opinion itself remains authoritative.
Sponsored-bill restatements — Bill metadata only — number, title, sponsor and dates; not bill text, and never a claim about what the measure does beyond its title.
Newsletter and blog connective prose — Database-assembled government facts and primary-source receipts, followed by human approval.

The blog/newsletter additionally requires human approval and at least three primary-source receipts before it can become public.

What that means for you. A generated summary can be incomplete, can miss nuance, and can be wrong. It is a starting point, not a citation. Every bill page links to the official text — if a summary and the bill disagree, the bill is right and we are wrong, and we want to know about it.

How current is it?

Bills and their actions sync daily from Congress.gov. Roll-call votes are pulled once the Clerk or the Senate publishes the official tally, which is usually the same day as the vote but can lag. Congress itself is the bottleneck, not us — when the official record is slow, so are we, and we would rather be late than guess.

Corrections

We publish the public record, and the public record is what holds us accountable too. If anything on this site is wrong — a vote, a date, a summary, a name — tell us and we will fix it. Corrections take priority over everything else in the inbox.

Report an error

Independence

Public civic pages may carry advertising for visitors and accounts without membership. Members receive the same information without ads. Advertisers have no influence over what we cover, how bills are summarized, or how anything is ranked — ad revenue buys placement next to the content, never inside it. We take no money from campaigns, PACs, or political organizations. See our Privacy Policy for exactly what our ad partners collect.

Independence