How scoring works

Your civic score

Your civic score is a running total of your participation. Every action is worth one point, and nothing decays:

• One point for each bill you vote to support or oppose.
• One point for each executive order you vote on.
• One point for each current-events topic where you pick a viewpoint.
• One point for each outcome question you answer.
• A bonus when an outcome prediction you made turns out to be right, resolved once the real outcome is known.
• A profile bonus for the optional demographic details you choose to fill in. Demographics are never required — they make aggregate district insights sharper.
• One point for each day you sign in.

Because it is a sum and never a rate, your score only moves up. It measures effort and consistency, not whether anyone agrees with your positions. Nothing about which way you voted changes the total. Yours is on your dashboard.

Representative alignment

An alignment score answers one question: when this representative cast a recorded vote on a bill their constituents had also voted on, how often did they land on the same side?

We take every bill where the representative has a recorded yes or no vote, look up what their constituents said about that same bill, and check whether the two matched. The score is the share that matched, expressed as a percentage. A representative who voted with their district on 34 of 40 comparable bills scores 85%.

Constituents are matched by jurisdiction, chamber, and district — the same rule everywhere the number appears, so a state senator is compared against the people in their senate district and no one else.

Which bills count

Most bills are excluded, on purpose. A bill only enters a representative's alignment score when all of the following hold:

• The representative has a recorded yes or no vote on it. Absences, abstentions, and procedural votes do not count for or against anyone.
• At least 3 constituents have voted on it. Below that, the district's position is too thin to hold a representative to, so the bill is skipped rather than counted on weak evidence.
• Constituents did not split evenly. If weighted support and opposition tie exactly, there is no majority to align with, so the bill is skipped.

A representative with too few qualifying bills has no alignment score at all. We show nothing rather than a number built on a handful of votes.

How constituent votes are weighted

Determining the district's majority uses weighted votes, so a burst of brand-new accounts cannot swing a bill on the day it becomes contentious. Weight is based on how long the account has existed:

• Accounts less than 7 days old count as 0.3 of a vote.
• Accounts between 7 and 30 days old count as 0.7.
• Accounts 30 days and older count as a full vote.

Weighting decides which side won. The 3-vote threshold above is checked against the raw count, so weighting can never make a thin sample look sufficient. This is a temporary participation minimum while more constituents join.

Underneath all of it is phone verification. It is the reason one person means one vote: without it, anyone could register enough accounts to manufacture a district majority and the alignment scores would be worthless.

What the scores do not mean

A high alignment score is not an endorsement, and a low one is not a scandal. Representatives vote on far more than what appears here, they weigh information their constituents do not have, and the people who vote on StateThat are not a random sample of a district. The score says how often a representative and the constituents who spoke up here agreed — nothing more.

Separately, we publish a signal-quality layer that estimates how reliable a given sentiment reading is, including sample size, weighting effects, and where the data came from. See the signal quality methodology for that.