How we source facts

Every fact has a source

Each fact on a card has a small numbered link. It opens the exact record the fact came from. Where the source is a data file, it opens the exact line. At the bottom of each card we list every source document, who published it, when we retrieved it, and a SHA-256 hash of the bytes we received, so anyone can check that we did not alter it.

Source tiers

Primary

A government record: a roll call vote, a bill page, an FEC filing, or a House or Senate disclosure. Anything a member did (votes, bills, trades, money) must cite a primary source.

Secondary

Reputable news, or a curated public dataset compiled from official records. Member bios and committee rosters currently come from the open @unitedstates congress-legislators dataset. We link every value to the exact line of the file at a fixed version.

Self-reported

The member's own press releases or speeches. We use these only to show what a member says, never as proof of what they did.

Press releases from partisan groups and AI-generated summaries are never accepted as the only source for a fact. When sources disagree, we show both and flag the disagreement.

Context, not scores

We do not give members an honesty or performance score. Every member gets the same rules regardless of party, and the wording stays neutral. Anything that is our own calculation, not published data, is labeled “Analysis”.

Noncommercial

This section has no ads and no paywall. Financial disclosure data may not be used for commercial purposes (5 U.S.C. § 13107), and we will never charge for it.