How Receipts builds a record

Actions and sources

Receipts combines attributable interviews, speeches, public policy statements, reputable reporting, and government records. Sources include Reuters, AP, public broadcasters, major newsrooms, Congress.gov, and official publications. Governor identities are checked against the National Governors Association directory. A government source verifies what that office published; it does not independently prove every claim in a press release.

Sponsored legislation, cosponsorship, roll-call votes, executive actions, and public statements are different actions. Sponsorship does not mean a bill passed. A vote on an amendment or procedure is not necessarily support for the entire bill. Court decisions and implementation can change a policy’s status.

Topics and coverage

Congress.gov’s policy areas and explicit topic terms help organize records. Topic assignment is a search aid, not a stance score. Dates, source links, and retrieval gaps are shown. Coverage is a sample and may omit older actions, votes, and statements.

Presidential document dates refer to Federal Register publication. Bill-list dates refer to introduction; the cosponsor join date is not supplied by that endpoint. Records needing review are excluded from AI overviews and stance calculations.

AI overviews

AI researches each known politician and topic using web search, then synthesizes supported public positions. Every summary claim and scored stance dimension must cite source records whose URLs appeared in the research results or saved evidence. Results are validated for source links, dates, structure, and citation IDs, then cached. This validates attribution structure, not every source’s factual accuracy. These checks do not guarantee an AI interpretation is correct. Read the linked records to assess it.

Policy review and portraits

Selected proposals are checked against Congressional Research Service summaries or their official legislative text. A saved fingerprint locks each scoring rubric to the reviewed version; changed source text requires renewed review. Only specifically reviewed roll-call questions receive policy scores. Present and Not Voting do not receive a score.

A vote against a proposal describes opposition to that proposal, not a preferred alternative or the voter’s motives. A vote and cosponsorship on the same reviewed policy count once. These selected proposals may not represent an official’s whole record.

Portraits use sourced photos from the Biographical Directory of Congress, House Clerk, Senate offices, the White House, and National Governors Association. Photos display naturally without posterization or face-altering filters.

Stance estimates

Each topic has three separate policy dimensions. A reviewed receipt can indicate 0 (strongly toward the left label), 25 (toward the left), 50 (explicitly mixed), 75 (toward the right), or 100 (strongly toward the right). The general-position marker estimates a broad direction from cited statements and reporting, with an explanation and links. Collected legislative records remain available as separate evidence.

Evidence count describes breadth, not statistical certainty. Party affiliation, a title keyword, and missing records never generate a score. Unsupported dimensions remain unscored; 50 means an explicitly mixed position, not missing information. Blue is the broadly Democratic/liberal end and red is the broadly Republican/conservative end. Policy labels and markers are reversed together wherever necessary, so their meaning stays consistent. These are broad tendencies, not universal party positions: speech, intervention, policing, trade, and other issues can divide both parties. Colors do not determine an individual’s placement or indicate an endorsement.