Methodology & coverage
How we know what we show.
Transparency is the product, so an unsourced datapoint is a bug. Everything on CivicGate traces back to an official record, every gap is stated plainly rather than hidden, and the same standard applies to every official regardless of party. This page explains exactly how.
Every datapoint is sourced
No fact without a citation. Every number, vote, dollar, and date CivicGate displays is traceable to the primary record it came from, and that record is linked wherever a URL exists. When you see the reference icon next to a value or under a section header, it opens the upstream document — the FEC filing behind a donation, the Congress.gov page behind a bill, the court record behind a judge — in a new tab.
The convention is consistent across the site: an item's own name or number links to its internal CivicGate page, and the reference icon beside it links to the external official record. Where a whole section draws on a single source, we print "Data from <source>" under the heading; where each item has its own source, the icon sits after each item. This is how the platform survives scrutiny and earns trust — you never have to take our word for anything.
Coverage honesty
Public data is uneven. Federal records are strong; state and local coverage is thinner and arrives on different schedules; some disclosures are annual, filed on paper, or simply absent. CivicGate shows what it has and says when data is thin — it never fabricates a confident "no data" verdict out of a coverage gap.
- Absence is labeled, not implied — a missing value reads as "not available," and we distinguish "we have no record" from "the record shows zero."
- Partial coverage is disclosed — where a series is incomplete (for example, state programs that lag federal ones), the section says so rather than presenting a partial picture as the whole.
- Baseline before headline — the durable historical record comes first, so a current number is always read in context.
- Missing means missing at the source — if a datapoint is absent, it is because the upstream record is absent, never an editorial choice on our end.
Neutral by construction
CivicGate surfaces the same data for every official regardless of party, and the way records are pulled, normalized, and rendered has no political lean built into it. We flag patterns and link to the evidence; we do not draw conclusions or rank people as "good" or "bad." The reader — a voter, a journalist, a researcher — reads the underlying record and decides. We make tools; others do the analysis.
Documented relationships
On Documented relationships and member profiles we surface neutral, sourced overlaps drawn entirely from the public record — for example, a member who sits on a committee that oversees a market sector they have disclosed trading in, or received industry-PAC money from. A documented relationship is not evidence of wrongdoing: committee assignments, oversight jurisdiction, STOCK Act trades, and PAC contributions are all public and lawful. We place them side by side, with sources, and let you judge — we never call it corruption, rank "offenders," or assert intent.
We are also honest about what we can't yet show. Signals that need data we can't source cleanly (industry classification is approximate; vote-versus-donor alignment needs bill-direction data we're still building) are left out and labeled pending rather than synthesized. Coverage notes on each signal say what a count does and doesn't include.
Primary data sources
The record comes from official and authoritative public sources, ingested on each source's own refresh cadence. These are the primary live ones; the full, current catalog — with access details and caveats — lives in the data-source registry.
New sources are added as coverage grows; each is registered in the catalog before it goes live, and any datapoint it produces carries its reference back to it.
Corrections & gaps
Because every value links to its source, a discrepancy is checkable against the original record. When the upstream source updates or corrects a record, CivicGate reflects the change on its next ingest — we do not silently overwrite history, and we do not "correct" a source to match an expectation. If a datapoint looks wrong, follow its reference icon to the primary document: that record is the ground truth, and it is exactly what we are showing you.
For what CivicGate is and the posture behind it, see About. To start reading the data, begin with People, Bills, or Money.