Where every number comes from
TrueVote is nonpartisan. We don’t rate candidates by ideology, we don’t endorse, and we don’t tell you how to vote. We put the public record — money, votes, trades, and where they overlap — in one place, cited to its source.
Data pipelines last ran July 16, 2026 — every source below refreshes automatically.
Sources
Candidate registrations, career fundraising totals, PAC & committee contributions, and independent expenditures (Super PAC spending).
STOCK Act trade disclosures for every member of Congress, including trade-vs-market performance data.
Official roll-call vote records, member by member, straight from each chamber's public XML feeds.
Congressional roster, committee assignments, and member photos — the public dataset maintained for civic use.
Active registered foreign agents, cross-referenced against committee jurisdictions.
How each metric is computed
Career fundraising totals
Summed from official FEC financial summaries across every election cycle a candidate has filed, merged across multiple registrations for the same person. Filed as reported — we don't estimate.
Top PAC & organization donors
Committee-to-candidate contributions from FEC bulk filings, summed per giving committee across recent cycles. Independent-expenditure transactions are excluded so money spent AGAINST a candidate is never shown as a donation. Individual small-dollar donors aren't itemized here; PAC and organization money is the influence signal this section measures.
Outside money & Dark Money (Potential)
Independent expenditures from FEC Schedule E, support and oppose tracked separately. Super PACs disclose their donors, but that money often originates from 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don't — so we label the share "potential," and flag confirmed undisclosed-source vectors separately.
Stock-trade performance
Dollar-weighted excess return of a member's disclosed purchases versus the S&P 500 over the same periods, annualized over the average holding period, computed from per-trade market data. Congress discloses amounts in ranges, so figures are estimates — labeled as such.
Follow the Money conflicts
A conflict is flagged only when documented facts line up: money from an industry, a seat on the committee that oversees that industry, and (where the record shows it) related votes or bills. We state the pattern; we never assert motive.
Values Matcher scores
Your answers are matched against each candidate's verified funding — including money spent to defeat them, which counts in reverse. An issue only scores when a real money signal exists (at least $1,000 net); new candidates with no record are labeled lower-confidence, not penalized. It measures money alignment, never tells you how to vote.
AI summaries
Generated only from the structured data above under strict rules: no claim that isn't in the data, no motive, no repeating headlines as fact, credit when the record is consistent. Regenerated when underlying data changes.
What we deliberately don’t do
- We never assert why a politician did something — we show the documented pattern and let you judge.
- We never repeat allegations or headlines as fact. If it isn’t in an official filing or record, it isn’t here.
- We never sell or share your data — and political-preference data (like matcher answers) is opt-in, deletable, and never leaves your account.
- We don’t pretend to precision the filings don’t have: Congress discloses trades in ranges and files on a lag, so some figures are labeled estimates.
Audit us
Every number should be reproducible from the sources above. If you find one that isn’t — a researcher, a journalist, a campaign, anyone — email truevote.ap@gmail.comand we’ll investigate, fix, and credit you. Corrections make the record truer. That’s the point.