Scorecard methodology

How a vote comparison is calculated

1. Verified constituent Support and Oppose positions are counted for the bill.
2. Vote weights recorded at cast time determine each side's displayed share.
3. A mandate must be locked before an official roll call is compared with it.
4. Aligned means the official's YES or NO vote matched the locked mandate. Defied means it was the opposite.
5. Abstentions, missing official votes, split results, and insufficient tallies do not receive either verdict.

Your alignment with an official

Your private alignment percentage counts only bills where both you and the official recorded a decisive position. Support matches a supporting vote, and Oppose matches an opposing vote. Unsure positions, abstentions, present votes, missing votes, and other non-votes are excluded from both the numerator and denominator. The formula is matching shared votes divided by all shared votes. Civitus displays the percentage after at least 3 shared votes.

Tiered verification note: phone-residence-v3

Only U.S. citizens' positions count toward mandates. A verified mobile phone establishes one account per phone. A normalized home address establishes the current district and representatives. Civitus then tries a voter-file match at that address. A confident match establishes residence and citizenship through voter registration. If no confident match is available, Stripe Identity checks a government ID and selfie after explicit biometric consent, and citizenship is established by the citizen's sworn attestation. ID verification has therefore returned only as a fallback, superseding its earlier retirement for new verification. If the ID address differs, a single-use postcard code establishes residence at the entered address.

Civitus keeps the phone verification result, timestamp, and a one-way phone hash; match result, confidence, provider reference, district, jurisdictions, and timestamp; consent and attestation records; and a one-way postcard-code hash until use or expiry. Civitus does not retain date of birth after the voter match, voter-file data, identity images, selfies, or raw postcard codes. Stripe holds identity media under its minimum configured retention setting. Changing the home address closes the current residence verification and requires L3 verification again.

Mandate formation

A mandate forms only when at least 100 verified constituents take a Support or Oppose position and one side reaches 60%. Unsure positions do not count toward the decisive headcount, and a result below 60% is split.

Verification rule

Current policy phone-residence-v2 evaluates new mandate eligibility using phone verification (L2) plus verified residence (L3). Government ID is not a new verification path. A position that already counted under an earlier government-ID rule remains counted if that same citizen changes their stance on that same bill. This grandfathering is per citizen and per bill; a position on any other bill must meet the current rule. Historical mandate snapshots are never rewritten.

Scorecard publication

Formation and publication are separate checks. Even when a mandate was locked under its recorded rule, a scorecard does not display Aligned or Defied unless at least 100 constituents are in that mandate's recorded headcount.

Ledger integrity and daily anchors

Counted-position changes, mandate locks, and official comparisons append opaque hashes to a database-enforced chain. Closed UTC days commit those event hashes and reported totals to a Merkle root. When OpenTimestamps anchoring is enabled, a later Bitcoin confirmation can show that the daily commitment existed by that block and has not changed since. It does not prove that an original input was accurate.

Public manifests omit raw choices and identities. Bill-scoped commitments support recounting without linking one participant across bills, and daily bill cohorts below 10 participants are suppressed. The all-time unique-participant figure is committed as an aggregate rather than exposed through a globally stable participant identifier. Inspect published batches and anchor status.

Corrections are now submitted from Me. Dispute a score.