About

A profile is not written and then closed. It grows from two things readers do.

They vote. Liberal or conservative, on each person, and the bar on that person's page moves with it.

They point at a source. A vote can carry one link — an article, a filing, a recording, whatever made you vote the way you did. That link is a lead, not a submission: the desk reads the original, checks it, and if it holds up, writes it into the record page with its date and its source. What you send is never published as your words, and never published unchecked.

That is where a record page comes from. The statements, the positions drawn from them, and the places where a newer position sits awkwardly with an older one are all downstream of what readers vote on and point to.

• One vote per person, per reader. Signing in is what makes that enforceable. You can change your mind later; you cannot be counted twice.
• One source per vote. Not a dossier — the single thing you would show someone who asked why.

Both limits exist for the same reason. A poll that lets one determined person vote a hundred times measures that person, not the public. Held to one each, what the bar shows is as close to a democratic reading of how a public figure is seen as we know how to get.

Ask a model where someone stands and you get a fluent, confident paragraph with nothing underneath it. You cannot see which sentence came from a court filing and which from a forum post, whether the quote is from this year or from a decade ago, or what was left out. More and more of what people believe about public figures is now arriving in exactly that shape.

This site is built the other way round. The source comes first and carries its own date; the reading of it is marked as a reading; and the count beside it moves when readers vote, not when a model changes its mind. It is slower and it is narrower, and it is checkable line by line — which is the whole point.

Statements are facts. Every one carries a date, a quote or a factual description, and a link to a primary or reputable secondary source. If it is not sourced, it is not on the site.

Positions, consistency readings and the red/blue rating are interpretations. They are the desk's reading of the statements, and they are always shown next to the statements they rest on so you can disagree with the reading while looking at the same evidence. Where a newer position sits badly with an older one, the consistency index sets out the case both ways rather than settling it. Where someone said they would do something, the promise tracker puts the declaration next to what the record shows happened — and says so plainly when the outcome has not been sourced yet.

A rating is not a verdict on a person. It is where the desk reads them as sitting on one axis, in the political context they operate in.

If something here is wrong — a date, a quote, a source that does not say what it is cited for, a reading you think the evidence will not carry — say so and it will be looked at against the original source. Corrections that hold up are made.

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A small independent editorial desk, unaffiliated with any party, campaign, company or publisher, and not funded by any of them. The site carries no advertising and no trackers — see Privacy for what it does and does not keep about you. It stays unbylined because the subjects of these pages include people with a demonstrated appetite for going after their critics personally, and a byline would change what can safely be published, which is a worse trade than the anonymity costs.