Methodology versions
| v2.1 · July 2026 | Two additions to legislator accountability; governor rules unchanged. First, a blended legislator grade: one grade combining the bills a member moves (Legislative Effectiveness Score, rank-normalized within chamber and majority status), how the region they serve has fared on their watch (senators, capped by Senate tenure), attendance, and promise-alignment. Parts we can’t yet measure are reserved at zero weight, never redistributed, and a “measured” figure says how much of the grade is real. Second, bill-spending vote pies: each member’s recorded votes on a rule-selected set of major money bills are joined to spending line-items pulled verbatim from the enacted bill text, showing what they voted to fund and to reject, every dollar cited to its section. Bills enter by a mechanical rule (enacted or floor-voted, ≥$1B, verifiable), never by hand; only appropriations feed a pie — authorizations, guarantee ceilings and pay-fors are disclosed but never summed in. |
| v2.0 · July 2026 | A core rule changed, so the major version moved. v1.0 gave Performance Scores only to executives and showed legislators’ outcomes as unscored context. That blanket exemption is replaced: an official is scored on the constituency they actually answer to, ranked only against the same office. Senators now get the same state-outcome card and OVR as governors, ranked among senators, over their current term — with influence-sharing disclosed and the state’s data-transparency penalty left with the governor, who actually controls those collections. House members are still not handed state numbers (they represent a district, not a state); district scoring awaits district data. All other rules — trend not level, lags, peer-differencing, the ±2.5σ cap, citizen weights, thin-data flags, human review for promise ratings — are unchanged. |
| v1.2 · July 2026 | Additive. Tax burden now measured as a share of personal income (Census ÷ BEA), replacing dollars-per-resident — the per-capita metric is retired to context. New social-services domain: SNAP food-aid access (USDA) and unemployment-insurance access (DOL). The overall rating can now be weighted by citizen priorities (Pew Jan. 2024 survey, cited on the methodology), published beside the equal-weight version. New data-transparency penalty for states that skip data collections they run. Directions, lags, weights and the penalty were fixed before any v1.2 score was computed. |
| v1.1 · July 2026 | Basket expansion, additive only: 16 verified categories now live (education, air quality, health coverage, obesity, early literacy, gun deaths, crime, teen births, wellbeing, taxes, energy cost — as each cleared two-stage verification), scored under the unchanged trend-vs-peers rules; overall rating (OVR) gates at 3+ scored categories (38 governors currently qualify). School-shooting casualties load as unscored context. Directions and lags fixed at registration, before scoring. The amendment text is in the published rulebook, dated. |
| v1.0 · July 2026 | Initial public release — Performance Score, Economy domain, one preregistered metric (unemployment rate, BLS LAUS). Full rulebook published verbatim at /methodology/v1.0/. |
Current data refresh: July 20, 2026. Data refreshes (new BLS years, roster updates) recompute scores under the same rules and are not logged as changes; new immutable score rows are written each run, so history is never overwritten.
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