Methodology & Sourcing
Where the statements and candidate data on this site come from, and the checks each one has to pass before it's published.
🗞️ Where statements come from
Every statement in the Statement Matcher is pulled from a politician's own public record: press releases and newsroom posts published directly on their official .house.gov, .senate.gov, or campaign site, government records, and direct news coverage that quotes them. We do not use third-party "in the news" reprints or paraphrases, only first-party sources.
A statement is only added to the game once it clears two independent checks:
- Attribution — the quote must sit directly beside a clause naming that politician ("…," said Rep. X), or follow that politician's own "released the following statement" declaration. Quotes attributed to co-sponsors, constituents, or reporters quoted in the same release are excluded rather than guessed at.
- Verbatim wording — the exact text is automatically checked against a cached copy of the cited source page. If the wording doesn't match, the statement is held back.
Statements that pass both checks automatically are published outright. Statements attributed by a weaker, page-level route (for example, a release that opens with "Rep. X issued the following statement" rather than naming them beside the quote itself) are held in a queue for a human to read the source and confirm the attribution by hand before they ever appear in the game. Nothing is bulk-approved.
🧭 Keeping the roster current
Statements are only shown for politicians who are currently in office or currently on the ballot. When someone leaves office or drops out of a race, their statements are retired from the game automatically rather than staying up indefinitely.
Candidate rosters — the people you see when you look up your ballot in "Find your politicians" or the full Pick-a-Pol app — are built from the FEC candidate master file plus each state's Secretary of State filing records, covering candidates in all 50 states, DC, and the U.S. territories. These are rebuilt from that source data rather than typed in by hand, so the roster stays accurate as filings change.
⚖️ Non-partisan by construction
Statements are shown without editorial commentary or framing — just the quote, the politician, and a link to the original source so you can read it in context yourself. The Statement Matcher's scoring is a simple correct/incorrect count; the full Pick-a-Pol app's candidate matching is a deterministic formula based only on how your answers compare to a candidate's sourced positions, with no manual thumb on the scale for any party or candidate.
🔍 Found an error?
If a statement looks wrong, out of date, or misattributed, email contact@gssolving.com with a link to the statement and we'll check it against the source.