01
The situation is bad.
Three out of four Americans, asked any way you can ask the question, say the same thing: the federal government does not represent them. Pollsters have been collecting this number for thirty years, and it has only gone in one direction. Up.
And yet incumbents keep winning. Reelection rates in the House routinely cross 90%. The Senate does a little better but not by much. We are stuck in a bizarre equilibrium where everyone agrees the system is broken and the same people keep running it.
Something is hiding the misalignment. Press releases. Glossy district mailers paid for with your tax dollars. Town halls that haven't happened in years. Floor speeches written for cable news clips, not for the constituents they're nominally addressed to. Voting records buried 14 clicks deep on a government website that hasn't been redesigned since 2007.
02
The fix isn't complicated.
The gap between what voters want and what their representatives do is not a mystery. It is a measurable, sortable, sharable number. The data already exists. Every roll call vote is public. Every donor disclosure is public. Every committee assignment, hearing transcript, financial filing — public.
The problem is not access to information. The problem is that nobody has time to read 1,400 pages of legislation written in legalese to figure out who their senator just sold them out to.
"Democracy requires citizens. Citizenship requires knowing what the hell is going on. Right now, knowing what the hell is going on requires a full-time job."
— the case for this website, in one sentence
So we built the tool we wished existed. Every vote scored against district will. Every piece of legislation in plain English. A public board for every member of Congress where their constituents can speak directly and the conversation is permanent and searchable. And, when the absurdity gets to be too much, a meme feed to laugh at the absurdity together.
03
What we will and won't do.
Civic tech projects fail for predictable reasons. They get bought. They take ad money and have to soften their edges. They take grant money and have to please foundations. They take VC money and have to grow at any cost. Every one of those compromises starts with someone saying: "we have to be sustainable." And every one of them ends with a slightly worse product that quietly serves someone other than the user.
So here's the deal we're making with you, in writing, in advance, before anyone has the chance to buy us:
✓ What we will do
Show every vote, every donor, every floor speech, every missed committee meeting. No spin. No talking points. Sources linked on every claim.
✗ What we will never do
Take a dollar of PAC money. Take corporate sponsorships. Take money from any political party, candidate, or 501(c)(4).
✓ What we will do
Apply the same standards to every politician of every party. If you find us softer on one side than the other, you have failed us and we have failed you.
✗ What we will never do
Run ads. Sell your data. Sell your activity. Sell your contact info. The product is the product. You are not the product.
✓ What we will do
Open-source our methodology. If we score a vote, you can see exactly how we scored it. If we summarize legislation, you can compare our summary to the source text.
✗ What we will never do
Endorse a candidate. Tell you how to vote. Tell you what to think. Our job is showing you what's happening — yours is deciding what to do about it.
If you ever catch us breaking any of these promises, screenshot it and put it on the internet. We'll thank you. The accountability has to cut both ways.
04
Where the money comes from.
Right now, from us. The four of us who built this funded the first year out of pocket. That bought enough runway to launch with no strings.
Going forward: a $5/month optional membership for people who want notifications, watchlists, and the weekly rundown. No paywall on the main product. Anyone can use the alignment scores, anyone can read the legislation summaries, anyone can post on the town hall boards. The membership is for people who like the project and want to keep it alive.
That's it. No grants. No foundation money. No "strategic partners." If the membership doesn't sustain it, the project doesn't deserve to exist.
05
This isn't activism. It's accounting.
We don't have a policy agenda. We don't want one. We are not asking you to take a particular position on healthcare, immigration, defense spending, taxes, or anything else. Those are your decisions to make.
What we are doing is much smaller, much narrower, much more clerical than that. We are keeping the books. We are showing the receipts. We are doing the un-glamorous work of writing down what happened so you can see it.
What you do with that information is up to you. You might decide your senator is doing a great job and donate to their campaign. You might decide they're terrible and work to unseat them. You might decide the whole thing is hopeless and tune out. All of those are valid responses to the data.
The only response that isn't acceptable is the one we have now — which is most people having no idea what their elected representatives are doing, voting on vibes every two years, and being shocked when nothing changes.
Politicians work for us. Time we remembered that. Time they remembered that too.