How we get this data

A card shows "Vote verified" when its vote passed one of these four checks. The card says which one. Verified refers to the vote: who voted how. It does not mean a person reviewed the linked facts.

• Official roll call data. House and Senate votes come straight from official roll call records, so no reading step is needed.
• Checked by two machine reads. A county vote is read from the official action report in two independent ways: a text parser, and an AI model (Claude). The vote is verified only when both reads agree and the tally adds up. No person reads the report.
• Checked by readers. Readers open the source and tap Matches or Doesn't match on an Unverified card. When enough readers say it matches, the card is verified.
• Checked by an admin. An admin can correct a card after an error report. This is for corrections only. There is no routine human review before a card appears.

A money fact adds up campaign contributions to the official from the industries linked to the vote. It covers the 365 days before the vote. The vote day and later days do not count.

• It shows only on a verified vote, and only when the counted total is at least $1,000, and either at least 1% of the official's itemized contributions, or in the top 3 of the members who voted. The rank is used to decide whether to show the fact. It is never printed.
• A fact built on people needs at least 3 distinct individual donors. Otherwise no fact is shown.
• Industry is matched by company name from a checked list and can be wrong.
• Refunds are taken off. A donor whose net total is zero or less counts as zero.
• A person who gave no real employer (for example "retired" or "self-employed") is dropped.
• Big Tech (Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta) has many workers outside data centers. Their employees count only in executive, policy or infrastructure roles, or when they gave $1,000 or more in total. The company and its PAC always count.
• Money from people is worded "people who work at" a company. It never says the company gave it.

The dollar total is rounded down to whole dollars. The share is of the itemized contributions the official reported: for federal officials, the FEC cycle that holds the vote; for Virginia officials, the same 365 days. Each fact says the latest filing date in our data ("Filed through").

An Unverified card is a vote that software read from the official document, but the two machine reads did not agree yet, or the tally did not add up. It has not been checked against the source. An Unverified card shows no money or lobbying facts.

Every Unverified card links to its source document. You can open it and tap Matches or Doesn't match. When enough readers say it matches, the card becomes verified. When enough say it does not, the card is hidden and read again automatically.