About VoteWire

Nobody is keeping score for you

Congress takes hundreds of recorded votes a year. Almost all of them pass or fail without the people affected weighing in, and by the time anyone notices, the vote is a row in a database nobody reads.

The asymmetry is the problem. Your representative has a permanent, public, searchable record of every position they have ever taken. You have nothing — so there is no comparison to make, and “does this person actually represent me?” stays a feeling rather than a number.

VoteWire fixes that by giving you a record too.

How it works

Every bill we track gets a thread. You get the plain-English summary written by the Congressional Research Service rather than the legalese, and you say how you'd vote: Yea or Nay. Then you argue about it with other people, including people in your own district — everyone's district sits next to their username, so you can see who you're talking to.

You go first. You're taking a position before the floor vote, not grading from hindsight. That makes it a commitment rather than a reaction, which is the only way the comparison afterwards means anything.

Then the roll is called, and VoteWire does the arithmetic.

What you get out of it

• An agreement score with each of your three members of Congress. Of the bills where you both took a position, how often you landed on the same side. Only the decisive roll call on each bill counts — final passage or its equivalent, not procedural motions — and abstentions are excluded rather than held against anyone.
• A check on whether they kept their word. Sponsoring or cosponsoring a bill is a formal, dated, publicly recorded statement that a member backs it. When the bill reaches the floor, VoteWire checks whether they voted for it. Sometimes they didn't, and that sits on their profile with a link to the roll call.
• The money. Who funds them, what those donors told Congress they were lobbying on, and — where a donor actually stated which side it was on — how the member voted.
• Your own record. A public profile of every position you've taken. The same standard we're holding them to.

Why you can trust the numbers

Because you don't have to. Every figure comes from a primary source and links back to it: bill text and summaries from GovInfo, roll calls from the Clerk of the House and the Senate, member records from the unitedstates project, contributions from FEC filings, lobbying from the disclosure register. Click through and check us.

The things we could compute but don't are as important as the things we do.

• We don't infer what a donor wanted. A position is recorded only when the organization said so in its own words, and the quote travels with it. The method.
• We don't decide which claims about a bill are true. That judgement can't be made neutrally on contested legislation, so we don't attempt it — reply and make the case instead.
• We don't remove comments for being wrong, only for how they're said, and every removal is published with the rule it broke. The rules · the log.

Some of the accounts here are ours. VoteWire is new, and threads with nothing in them tell you nothing about a bill, so we seeded sample discussion to give the pages a shape. Those accounts are marked Demo beside the handle on every comment and on their profile, they argue about process rather than making claims about what any particular bill does, and they will be deleted once real conversation replaces them. Nothing they write counts toward anything: not a member's record, not a leaderboard, not a Needle but their own.

A site that asks you to check Congress's receipts should show its own.

The Needle: how it's worked out

Your profile can show a dial — we call it the Needle — of which side of the aisle your votes actually land on. One decision does all the work in that number, and it's worth stating plainly.

We only count votes where the two parties disagreed. A large share of what Congress votes on is near-unanimous — suspensions of the rules, post office namings, procedural housekeeping. Score someone across all of it and everyone drifts to the center, because the agreement was manufactured by the sample rather than by them. So a roll call counts only when the Republican majority went one way and the Democratic majority went the other. On those, your yea or nay lands on one side or the other, and the Needle is the ratio.

There is no model behind it. No scaling, no ideology score, no hidden dimension — a count with a visible denominator, and every vote in it listed so you can check the arithmetic yourself. That costs some sophistication and buys the thing that matters more: you can argue with it on the facts.

Three limits, stated rather than buried:

• You choose the bills. This isn't a random sample of Congress. It measures how you vote on what you care about, which is not the same as how you'd vote on everything.
• Ten votes minimum. Below that the needle is noise, so we say “not enough yet” instead of drawing one.
• Independents sit out. They caucus with a party but aren't in one, and counting them either way would be a judgement the data doesn't support.

It describes a record, not a person. “You voted with the Republican majority 15 times out of 24” is checkable; “you are a Republican” is a claim about you that this data can't make.

It is private unless you publish it. Off by default, because a score strangers can see changes how people vote — you start managing the number instead of saying what you think. Your setting.

You can save the Needle as a picture and post it wherever you like, published or not — that's your own reading and it's yours to show. What the setting controls is whether anyone who lands on your profile sees it, and whether a link to your profile unfurls with it.

What we hold about you

A username, an email, and a ZIP code — used once to resolve your congressional district and then only ever displayed as a label like CO-2. Your positions and comments are public under your username. ZIP codes sometimes straddle two districts, so you can correct your district by hand if we guess wrong.

What isn't here yet

Being straight about the gaps, since the whole thing rests on not overclaiming:

• No notifications. Nothing emails you when a bill you weighed in on reaches the floor. It's the next thing worth building.
• Only money that reaches a filing. Federal contributions and independent expenditures are here, individual donors included. Spending that never touches an FEC report — issue advertising by groups that don't have to name their donors, and everything at state level — is invisible to us, and there is no honest way to estimate it.
• Thin lobbying coverage. Hundreds of bills, positions on far fewer, growing weekly.
• Not every bill ever. The database covers recent activity in the 119th Congress — 1,063 bills as it stands, against the tens of thousands introduced in a two-year Congress. When the site says “every bill” it means every bill we track.