How the Voter Choice alignment API compares a supplied issue stance with public roll-call records, including selection, limits, evidence, and corrections.
Issue scoring is separate from the free ballot
The free ballot does not collect your issue preferences or score candidates for you. The alignment API compares a supplied issue and stance with available public records of votes on bills. It does not endorse, certify, rank, or recommend candidates.
Which votes count
We score retained votes tagged to the matching issue within an inclusive rolling four-calendar-year window. An exact subissue is used when it has at least five scorable votes; otherwise the calculation falls back to the full parent-issue corpus.
Votes from a data repair stay out of scores until we check how they should count.
Yea and nay votes can count with or against the stance. Present, absent, not-voting, unknown vote values, and tags without a valid direction are excluded from both numerator and denominator.
Scores, limited records, and evidence
The percentage is the votes aligned with the confirmed stance divided by all scorable selected votes, rounded to the nearest whole number. One to four votes still produce a score with a limited-data notice. With no scorable votes, the percentage is unavailable rather than zero.
The score uses the full selected corpus. We display no more than six evidence rows, ordered by tag confidence and then vote recency, so the visible examples may be fewer than the votes used in the calculation.
Candidate matching and limitations
Candidate matching is limited to the supplied jurisdiction and uses guarded name heuristics. An ambiguous or unmatched identity produces no result. Coverage depends on the records Voter Choice has retained and tagged; it is not complete for every office, jurisdiction, issue, or date.
Sources and AI-derived text
Federal roll calls and bill information come from Congress.gov; state legislative records may come from OpenStates and the applicable legislature. Evidence links identify the retained source used for the record; when an official authority link is available, we identify it separately from an aggregator. Some plain-language bill summaries are generated from public-domain CRS material and must be labeled as AI-generated; undecided external narratives are not published through the transparency contract.
Read the source catalog, freshness notes, attribution, and limitations.
Versioning and corrections
Methodology version alignment-v2.5.18 is effective 2026-10-05. Patch releases clarify or add optional metadata, minor releases add backward-compatible fields or sources, and major releases change scoring or status meanings. Results can still change as the rolling window and source data change.
To report a suspected error, email support@voterchoice.vote with the relevant source. We review reports and make corrections where warranted.