Terms of Service

Constituent Voice is available to US residents who are 18 years of age or older and are eligible constituents of a US congressional district. You may create one account per person. Creating multiple accounts, sharing an account, or registering on behalf of another person is prohibited.

You must provide accurate information during registration, including your legal name (where collected for identity verification purposes), phone number, and residential address. Your address is used solely to map you to your congressional district. Providing a false address to claim membership in a district where you do not reside is a violation of these Terms.

Constituent Voice is a nonpartisan civic engagement tool that allows verified US constituents to register advisory dissent votes on recorded congressional roll-call votes cast by their own representatives. It is operated by Civica Public Voice, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Dissent votes registered on Constituent Voice are advisory only. They carry no legal weight, create no binding obligation on any representative, and have no effect on the outcome of any legislation or election. The platform is a transparency and accountability tool, not a mechanism for direct democracy or binding referenda.

Constituent Voice is strictly nonpartisan. It does not endorse, oppose, or favor any political party, candidate, ideology, or policy position. Dissent votes are aggregated and published without editorial judgment about their political significance.

After a representative casts a recorded roll-call vote in the House or Senate, verified constituents in that district may register dissent on that vote at any time during the current congressional session. After casting a dissent, you have a brief 10-second grace period to cancel and re-cast. Once the grace period expires your dissent locks permanently and cannot be changed. Intermediate cancel-and-re-cast history is not recorded.

Dissent votes are district-specific. You may only dissent on votes cast by your own representatives (your House member and both US Senators from your state), as determined by your verified residential address.

Once your dissent locks, your vote state becomes part of the permanent, immutable public record at session end. It cannot be changed or deleted after locking, as it forms part of the published aggregate tally. Your individual identity is never published, only the aggregate count per district.

Only dissent votes are published in the aggregate public record. Affirming a vote (a UI acknowledgement that you do not wish to dissent) is never published or reported to anyone. District dissent counts are not visible to any user, including you, until your own dissent locks; this keeps a running tally from influencing a decision still in progress.

You may not:

• Create more than one account, or create accounts on behalf of others
• Provide false identity or address information to claim a district where you do not reside
• Coordinate, solicit, or organize bulk dissent vote campaigns intended to manipulate aggregate counts through fraudulent registrations
• Attempt to access, alter, or interfere with another user’s account or vote
• Use automated tools, bots, or scripts to interact with the platform
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, scrape, or systematically download platform data beyond what is publicly displayed
• Use Constituent Voice for any commercial purpose

Violations may result in account suspension or permanent termination at our sole discretion.

Bill summaries, In Favor, and Against artifacts displayed on Constituent Voice are generated by artificial intelligence using publicly available legislative source documents (bill text, Congressional Research Service reports, and committee reports). All AI-generated content is labeled as such on the platform.

AI-generated content may contain errors, omissions, or imprecise characterizations. It is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, political, or legislative advice. Users may flag content they believe is inaccurate; flagged content is subject to automated re-evaluation.

Civica Public Voice makes no warranty that AI-generated summaries are complete, accurate, or unbiased, and is not liable for any decision made in reliance on them.

You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account credentials. Notify us immediately at admin@civox.us if you believe your account has been compromised.

The Constituent Voice application code is published under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). The source code, AI prompts, verification methodology, and platform logic are publicly available. Any fork or hosted derivative of this software must also be published under AGPL-3.0.

Constituent Voice is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the platform will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that dissent counts will be free from fraudulent manipulation despite our fraud-prevention measures.

We are not responsible for the content of external websites linked from the platform, including Congress.gov or any legislative source documents.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Civica Public Voice and its officers, directors, employees, and volunteers shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of Constituent Voice, including but not limited to loss of data, loss of dissent vote state, or reliance on AI-generated content.

Our total liability to you for any claim arising from your use of Constituent Voice shall not exceed the amount you paid to us in the twelve months preceding the claim (if any).

You may close your account at any time by contacting admin@civox.us. We may suspend or terminate your account for violation of these Terms, fraudulent activity, or extended inactivity.

Closing your account starts a 30-day grace period before permanent erasure. During that window you can restore your account by logging back in. After the grace period ends, your account data is permanently erased.

Aggregate dissent tallies derived from your votes that have already been published as part of the immutable public record will not be altered upon account deletion, as they contain no individual-identifying data.

We may update these Terms. When we do, we will update the effective date and notify registered users by email for material changes. Continued use of Constituent Voice after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict of law provisions. Any dispute arising under these Terms shall be resolved in the state or federal courts located in Travis County, Texas.

Civica Public Voice
admin@civox.us