Methodology and editorial standards

Mission and principles

A structured archive of what elected officials and candidates have actually done: how they voted, what they said on the record, who funded their campaigns, and how they responded when something consequential happened. Every record ties to a primary source citation. Every citation is publicly visible. Any visitor can verify any entry independently.

An editorial publication. PoliLedger does not characterize, summarize, or interpret candidate records. It does not endorse candidates or parties. It does not publish opinion. It does not accept advertising. It does not accept funding from candidates, campaigns, political parties, PACs, or any politically affiliated organization. The site has no position on any policy issue and no preferred electoral outcome.

Every record on this site answers one of four questions: what did this person do in office, who funded their campaign, what did they say verbatim and on the record, or what happened and how did they respond. If a record cannot be tied to a verifiable primary source that answers one of those questions, it does not appear here.

Scope

State legislative races below the gubernatorial level are not currently tracked, though the site is built to accommodate them in a future expansion phase. Local races, party leadership elections, and ballot measures without candidates are also out of scope. Ballot measures are tracked as events that can trigger candidate responses, not as races themselves.

A candidate enters the system upon formal filing declaration: FEC filing for federal races, the state equivalent for gubernatorial races. Exploratory committee filings are tracked with a visible exploratory status indicator. Announced but unfiled candidates are not included.

Policy pillar taxonomy

Action types

These require holding office. They come directly from government records and are populated automatically by the data pipeline with no human editorial involvement.

Voted yes · Voted no · Abstained or present · Missed vote · Sponsored bill · Co-sponsored bill · Amended · Voted to table · Signed into law · Vetoed · Issued executive order · Issued executive action · Filed suit · Confirmed · Blocked or held

These are available to incumbents and candidates alike. Each requires a direct verbatim quote from the candidate, a primary source URL, and human review before publication.

Issued statement · Endorsed · Issued statement of opposition · Testified · Debate position · Campaign pledge · Press release · Interview on record · Filed legal challenge

Every tier 2 entry requires a verbatim quote from the candidate exactly as it appears in the cited source. No paraphrase, no summary, no characterization. If a statement is grammatically awkward or incomplete in the original, it is logged that way. Fidelity to the source takes precedence over readability in every case.

Data sources and source credibility tiers

Congress.gov · FEC.gov · Federal Register · OpenStates · State election board filings · Court filing databases including PACER and state equivalents · Official congressional record and committee transcripts · White House and gubernatorial executive order databases

Tier 1 records are ingested nightly by an automated pipeline. They are matched against existing candidate and race records and published directly. No editorial judgment is applied to tier 1 data.

Official candidate and officeholder websites · Official government and agency press releases · C-SPAN video and transcript archive · Official campaign finance disclosures · Congressional Budget Office and GAO reports · Inspector general reports · Official debate transcripts from sponsoring organizations

Tier 2 sources require a human reviewer to extract the verbatim quote, confirm the source resolves to a primary record, and approve the entry before it publishes.

Wire services with named bylines such as AP and Reuters · Major regional newspapers of record · Official party press releases · Academic and policy institution reports

Tier 3 sources help identify that an event occurred or that a statement was made. They are never cited as the source of a published entry. If a primary source cannot be located from a tier 3 flag, the entry is not published.

Political party advocacy content · Campaign attack ads or opposition research · Editorial boards and opinion journalism · Partisan think tanks and advocacy organizations · Social media posts without corroboration from tier 1 or tier 2 sources · Aggregator sites including Wikipedia · Polling data as evidence of a candidate's position · Anonymous or unnamed sources · AI-generated summaries of any kind

Correction process

If a published record does not match its cited source, it is corrected immediately. The correction is logged with the date and a plain description of what changed. A visible correction notice appears on the entry showing exactly what was changed and when. No entry is ever silently edited. Every change to a published record is timestamped and permanently visible.

A nightly automated pass checks every published source URL. Any URL that fails validation triggers a source-pending indicator on the entry. If the page is confirmed gone, the pipeline checks the Wayback Machine automatically. If no equivalent source can be located within 30 days, the entry moves to suspended status — removed from public view but preserved in the database.

Any visitor, candidate, official, or representative can submit a dispute through the report mechanism on any published entry. Filing a dispute does not remove the entry. Entries are not taken down because someone objects to them. The dispute is logged publicly on the entry with the date filed. The quote is verified against the cited source. If the quote is accurate and the source is valid, the entry stands and that outcome is logged publicly.

No entry is ever deleted from the database regardless of status. Suspended entries, corrected entries, and disputed entries all remain in the database with their full history intact. The correction log for any entry is as permanent as the entry itself.

What this site does not do