Methodology

All bill summaries, In Favor statements, and Against statements are generated by an AI pipeline. No human writes or rewrites any of this content. For each artifact, the pipeline runs:

• Source gathering.The canonical bill text is pulled from Congress.gov, along with supporting materials from the Congressional Research Service and committee reports. Where the official record contains them, committee-report majority and minority views are pulled as supplementary grounding. The primary basis for both sides is the bill's own text: the benefit it aims to deliver, and the costs and trade-offs of doing what it does.
• AI synthesis. A language model generates the summary, the In Favor case, and the Against case under strict prompts, in plain language at roughly an 8th-grade reading level, without advocacy verbs and without characterizing supporters or opponents.
• Asymmetry check.A second AI pass evaluates the In Favor and Against blocks for word-count parity, hedging-language parity, and sentiment parity, and confirms each side fairly and accurately represents its genuine grounded case with comparable seriousness and space. It does not force equal persuasiveness where the bill's underlying cases genuinely differ in strength; it fails an artifact only for unfairness, distortion, hollowness, or strawmanning. If a problem is detected, the affected block is regenerated until the artifact passes.
• Publication.The artifact is published with a visible "AI-generated" label and a link to congress.gov for the actual bill text.

Constituent Voice uses a tiered verification model. Every account is mapped to a congressional district from a validated residential address, but not every tier is strong enough to count toward a public tally.

• Email-verified.Confirmed email plus an address verified against USPS delivery data. Enough to browse the platform and read your representatives' voting record, but not enough to cast a counted dissent or click No Vote.
• Phone-verified. A mobile or landline number confirmed by a one-time code, matched against the signup address. Counted.
• Postal-verified.A code mailed to the constituent's address and entered back on the platform. The strongest verification offered, since it confirms the person receives mail at that address. Counted.

A counted dissent or No Vote requires at least phone or postal verification. Email verification alone is too easily spoofed with a real but non-resident address to anchor a public tally. Every counted vote is weighted identically, one verified constituent, one vote, regardless of which verification tier it was cast at.

For any bill in a constituent's feed, tied to a representative's recorded vote, that vote has already been cast. (A separate Current page, described in Section 4, shows bills that have not yet reached a floor vote; those carry no representative position, since there is no recorded vote yet to attach one to.) The recorded vote is the feed's primary surface: voted yes, voted no, voted present, or did not vote. Constituent Voice does not score, rank, or editorialize how a representative voted; it records the vote, presents the In Favor and Against cases, and measures constituent disagreement.

Dissent attaches to a specific yea or nay. On rows where the recorded vote is present or not voting, no Dissent control is presented; there is no recorded position to register dissent against. The row remains visible in the feed as a read-only record of the absence.

A roll-call vote attaches to whoever cast it. When a seat changes hands mid-term, the feed continues to show the predecessor's votes alongside the current officeholder's, each row attributed to whoever was in office at the time.

Alongside the feed of recorded votes, a separate Current page shows every active bill in the present Congress that has not yet reached a floor vote, so constituents can see what is moving through committee and read a plain-language summary before a vote happens, not only after. Current bills carry no representative position and no Dissent or No Vote control; those require a recorded vote to attach to.

Bills are ranked by two disclosed, mechanical factors: Legislative Activity (65 percent), a composite of seven signals from Congress.gov's own record (committees assigned, hearings held, markups held, recorded votes, amendments offered, amendments adopted, and chamber transitions), and Cosponsor Support (35 percent), scored from a bill's own cosponsor count rather than ranked against other bills. Every factor used is a plain fact anyone can verify directly on Congress.gov.

Bills already on the House or Senate's own published floor schedule are shown separately, as a plain fact, rather than folded into the ranking.

The same AI-generated summary, In Favor, and Against artifacts described in Section 1 are produced for Current bills. The 30 highest-ranked bills are summarized automatically; any other bill is summarized the first time someone opens it, then cached. If a Current bill later reaches a floor vote, its summary is checked against the bill's text at that point and regenerated only if the text has changed since.

Dissent counts are gated by commitment, not by time. A constituent with a locked dissent, or a locked No Vote (a way to see the count without taking a position, since it's never published, counted, or surfaced anywhere), can see the running district count for that vote. A constituent who has not committed, or whose cast is still within the short cancel-and-recast window, sees no running count.

Counts become publicly visible to everyone when the congressional session ends. At that moment the locked tallies are finalized and published as a permanent, immutable historical record. Representatives, their staff, and the press see the same view as any visitor; no one gets privileged early access.

The reason is methodological. A live running count produces cascade dynamics: a visible count pulls in additional dissents when high and suppresses them when low. Gating visibility on personal commitment breaks that dynamic, so the published tally is built entirely from independent judgments made before anyone could see what others had decided.

Majority Dissent is awarded when locked dissents exceed 50% of a representative's entire eligible district. Registered Majority Dissent approximates this threshold with increasing accuracy as the number of Tier 2+ verified constituents registered in that representative's district or state increases. At least 30 registered constituents are necessary for Registered Majority Dissent to fire. Below that floor, the Dissent Ratio (the share of registered constituents who dissented) is shown as a raw count rather than a percentage.

• Congress.gov, operated by the Library of Congress, is the canonical source for bill text, vote records, sponsorship, and committee actions.
• The Congressional Research Service and committee reports are primary sources for the In Favor and Against arguments.
• Committee-report majority and minority views are used as supplementary grounding where the official record contains them.
• The bill text on congress.gov is the source of record; Civica's artifacts are summaries, not substitutes.

Civica artifacts are AI-generated. Users are urged to consult the official bill text on Congress.gov for any authoritative or legal interpretation. The asymmetry check is itself an AI process, with the same limitations as any large-language-model output, and its performance is monitored on an ongoing basis.