How we decide what was promised, and whether it was kept.

A rating describes what happened, not whether the promise was a good idea. Each rating has its own icon, label and color, so you can read it without relying on color.

Profiles count every roll-call vote in the current Congress, from the official records at senate.gov and clerk.house.gov. The numbers are worked out the same way for everyone.

Votes with party. For each roll call we find how most of the member’s party voted, yea or nay. We then count how often the member’s own yea or nay matched. Roll calls where the party split evenly, and votes of present, aren’t counted. Independents are compared with the party they caucus with.

Missed votes. Roll calls where the member was recorded as not voting. The chamber median is the middle rate among members who were there for at least half of the Congress’s roll calls, so a member sworn in last month doesn’t skew it. Members miss votes for illness, family leave or campaigning, so a high number is a prompt to look closer, not a verdict.

Careers and committees. Terms in Congress and the White House, leadership roles and committee seats come from congress-legislators, a public-domain dataset maintained by the open-source @unitedstates project. “Elected 2014” is worked out from when a term began; we don’t give a year when a term began at an unusual time, such as after a special election.

Backgrounds. Birth dates come from congress-legislators. Birthplaces, schools and degree levels, occupations, military service and offices held outside Congress come from Wikidata, an openly licensed database anyone can edit, and link to the entry they came from so you can check them and fix them at the source. Before publishing them we had a random sample checked against official biographies: about 1 fact in 13 was wrong or misleading, mostly employers and the exact type or field of a degree. We dropped those, so profiles show degree levels (“Bachelor’s degree”), not majors, and no employers unless we researched them. “None recorded” means our sources don’t list something, not that it didn’t happen.

Some facts, such as where someone grew up or what they did before office, are researched by us. Each cites its sources and is published only after an independent check. When research finds an imported fact is wrong, we hide it until the source is corrected.

Bill notes. On some bills we add short notes beside the text explaining, in plain language, what a passage does, who it affects, what it spends, which laws it changes, when it takes effect, or what a defined term means. Notes describe what the text says, never whether it is a good idea. Each note is tied to one version of the bill, says who wrote and checked it, and is published only after an independent check against the bill text.

politrack is funded by [FUNDING SOURCES]. We don’t accept money from campaigns, parties, political action committees or officials we track. Donors have no say over which promises we track or how we rate them.

Editors may not work for, donate to or volunteer for any campaign or party while they work here. Each editor’s relevant past work is listed on the editorial team page.

When we get something wrong, we fix it on the page, add a dated note there, and list it here.

Every rating records the version of these rules it was made under. When we change them, we publish a new version and say what changed.