Political tracking features

Candidate Dossier

A full accountability profile for each politician:

• Promise scorecard — all tracked campaign promises with one of nine symmetric outcome ratings (Full / Championed / Partial / Attempted / No opportunity / Ignored / Abstained / Misaligned / Hostile) or a lifecycle status (Draft / Not yet rated / In progress), original immutable wording, source citations, and significance weighting.
• Office & law context — plain-language explainer of the office: term length, term limits, powers, duties, how elected, and the constitutional/statutory basis.
• Opponent strip — automatically surfaces opponents from shared race data (no manual entry needed).
• Candidate right of reply — verified politicians can add official responses and propose corrections; they may never erase promises or alter source history.

Promise Tracking — Four Layers of Truth

Every fact is filed at the right layer so crowd opinion is never dressed up as a sourced fact:

1. Layer 1 — Verified facts — Immutable records imported from official government sources, each content-hashed.
2. Layer 2 — Structured claims — Sourced promises and stated positions, versioned in an append-only revision log.
3. Layer 3 — Assessments — Auditable, disputable ratings — community-aggregated or fact-checker-adjudicated.
4. Layer 4 — Opinions — Clearly labeled community sentiment, structurally separated from the factual record.

Transparent Rating System

The promise-keeping score is a reproducible, significance × confidence–weighted aggregation — not an opaque single number. The raw data is exportable; the formula is published at /methodology. The identical methodology applies to every politician regardless of party.

Evidence-Backed Sourcing

Every promise and status change requires at least one sourced citation before it counts toward a rating. Sources carry an archived URL and a content hash to prevent link-rot and stealth edits. Unsourced records stay in DRAFT and never affect a politician's score.

Tamper-Evident Audit Log

Every edit to any record writes a hash-chained Revision entry. The chain is append-only and can be verified for tampering. Nothing is hard-deleted — deletes set a soft-delete flag while the record remains in the audit history.

Candidate Comparison

Side-by-side comparison of two politicians across their promise scorecards and integrity scores. Pre-filled with tracked officials when no opponents are specified.

Corrections Pipeline

Any verified contributor can propose a correction on a promise, source, or position. New contributors’ corrections are held for two-reviewer approval; Established+ contributors’ corrections apply immediately (subject to challenge). Candidates may submit official responses visible alongside the original record.

Transparent Data Sources

A public /sources page lists every dataset StumpWatch uses — election returns, turnout, boundaries, legislative records, campaign finance — with a direct link to the original source so anyone can independently verify the underlying numbers.

Find Your Representatives

Look up every representative for your address — U.S. Senators, your Governor, your U.S. House member, and your state’s upper and lower state-legislative district representatives — via a ZIP or city/state lookup on the home page and at /my-representatives. Currently covers federal and state offices; purely local/municipal offices aren’t included yet.

Voting & Legislative Record

Every profile with voting data shows a roll-call voting record, an attendance rate (missed-vote %), a bill-sponsorship history imported from Congress.gov, and a party-independence score (how often a member votes against their own party’s majority) — computed over the most recent roll calls on file.

Campaign Finance (FEC)

Every profile with FEC filings on record charts per-cycle fundraising: total receipts and disbursements over time, cash-on-hand, and the mix of small-dollar individual, large individual, and PAC contributions. FEC doesn’t publish industry/sector data, so that breakdown isn’t offered; a donor-to-vote correlation is planned but not yet built.

Stated Positions

Sourced, dated stated positions on issues appear on every candidate’s profile, kept as a distinct layer from tracked promises and assessments. A dated evolution timeline showing how a position has shifted over time is planned but not yet built.