Methodology

Provenance on every record

Each bill, vote, representative and news item stores its source URL, the time we retrieved it, the source publication time when the source provides one, and the ingestion version that produced it. If we cannot cite a source, we do not present a value as a fact.

Freshness, not “live”

We say Updated rather than Live until a measured source publication delay supports a stronger claim. Each source page shows its last successful update and is flagged stale or outage when it stops returning fresh data.

Vote-state semantics

A vote applies to one dated motion or stage. We keep Yes, No, Abstain, Absent and Unknown / not published strictly distinct. A missing individual record is shown as unknown and is never converted into absence, abstention or a no vote.

Sponsorship and authorship are filing actions. They are modelled separately from vote choice and never imply how anyone voted.

Identity and terms

People are keyed to a stable internal ID plus a chamber and congressional term, so a name change or a new Congress never merges two different people and a historical role is not shown as current.

Corrections

When a source corrects a record, we retain the correction note and replace the value in place rather than creating a duplicate. See Corrections to report an error.