Neutrality, editorial standards & corrections

How we stay neutral

Neutrality isn’t a promise to have no opinions. It’s a set of habits that keep our opinions out of the numbers. These are ours:

• Written rules, the same for everyone. Pork totals, party breaks, missed votes, the Countdown and WOW tags each follow a fixed rule in plain English on How we calculate. A rule is never applied to one member and skipped for another. The few lists the rules rely on (for example, which independents are counted with the party they caucus with) are part of the rules and apply to everyone.
• Software applies the rules; people don’t adjust the results. No one edits an individual member’s numbers by hand to change how they look.
• Party is a label, not a lever. Party comes from the official record and is shown as a label. Party plays no part in the pork numbers, and the “broke with party” rule is the same for Democrats, Republicans and everyone else.
• No endorsements. We don’t tell you who to vote for, which bills to back, or which members are good or bad.
• Rules work out the numbers; people approve the words. Our numbers are computed by fixed rules from official data; AI doesn’t produce them. We don’t publish AI-generated opinions or ratings about members or bills. Plain-English text on PORKER, including this page, may be drafted with software help, including AI tools, and is reviewed and approved by people at PORKER before it goes live. Bill summaries drafted by AI are not published unless a person has reviewed and approved them.
• Not for sale. There are no ads and no paid placement, and nobody can pay to change what a page says.
• Light tone, plain facts. Yes, our name is a nickname for “pork-barrel spending,” and we joke that we “hate them all equally.” The joke is about the tone. The numbers are the same for every member.

If you think a page treats someone unfairly, tell us (see Corrections). Bias complaints get the same check as errors.

Where our data comes from

We start from official public records. A few items come from outside the government and are marked, so you know what kind of source each is. No number on PORKER comes from polls, news articles or social media posts, and we don’t show or score campaign-finance data (donations, fundraising or PAC money) today.

The same list is on About. If we add a source, we add it here first.

How data is updated, and its limits

How it’s updated

• Congress.gov bill and action data is refreshed every night, with an extra refresh on weekday evenings. House and Senate roll-call votes are checked every 15 minutes, committee meetings hourly, bill text hourly through the day, and the House floor schedule twice a day.
• Member and bill pages say when their data was last updated (“Data as of…”).
• Spending (earmark) tables are loaded in batches after the official tables are published, so they can lag.

What to keep in mind

• We can be behind. An action or vote can appear on the official sites before it appears on PORKER. When the official record is incomplete or doesn’t add up, we skip it rather than guess.
• Pork isn’t the full picture yet. Some spending bills are missing because their official tables aren’t published or are scanned images we can’t read reliably. Each pork page lists what’s missing.
• Some data covers only part of history. Vote-based numbers cover only the Congresses whose roll calls we have loaded, and older Congresses are thinner.
• Estimates are estimates. The Countdown and Seats at Risk are rough, rules-based first looks, not predictions.
• Not every method is written up yet. Seats at Risk, the left–right voting position (from Voteview) and the lobbying matches aren’t described on How we calculate yet. We will add them.
• Lobbying filings are self-reported by the people who file them. A filing that names a bill doesn’t prove anyone lobbied a particular member.
• Outside sources have their own limits. Voteview and The Downballot are not government records. We credit them where we use them.

What “pork” and our scores mean — and don’t

Every number measures one narrow thing. None of them is a grade of how good a member is.

How citizen votes and ratings are shown

Registered PORKER users can rate members (Likeable and Effective, on a scale from −2 to +2) and vote on bills (do you agree, and will it become law). Here is how that works:

• They are our registered users, not a poll. People choose to take part, so the results don’t represent all Americans or any district. They are not weighted or adjusted, and they are not an election.
• Group totals only. A rating or vote is added into group totals. We never show who voted or how a person voted.
• We show how many. Scores come with the number of citizens behind them, and a score appears only once a minimum number of citizens have rated.
• One account, one vote. Each account counts once per member or bill, and rating or voting needs a confirmed email. Accounts that never confirm are removed after 14 days. People can change their vote any time. We can’t rule out every attempt to game the totals, which is one more reason they are opinion, not measurement.
• Kept separate from the record. Citizen results never change an official record or any number worked out from one (pork totals, party breaks, missed votes, the Countdown). They show up only in their own labelled places: the citizen boards, group totals on member and bill pages, and one WOW tag, “Citizens disagree.”

Corrections: how to report an error

What happens next

1. We confirm we got it. You get a reply from support@porker.vote within 3 business days.
2. We check the original source. Congress.gov, the House Clerk, the Senate or the relevant official table, and the written rule behind the number.
3. We decide and tell you. If we’re wrong, we fix it. If the official source itself is wrong, we say so, point to the source, and note it in the log. If it’s not an error (for example, you disagree with a rule), we explain why.
4. We log it. Every correction that readers could have relied on goes in the public log below, with the date, the page, what was wrong and what changed.

We change numbers only when they are wrong. We don’t change or remove a number because a member, campaign, group or company asks, and requests from congressional offices are handled like anyone else’s. If a rule itself looks unfair, we may change it for every member at once, and we say so on How we calculate.

Public corrections log

Newest first. Dates are Eastern Time.

Each entry will show the date, the page, what was wrong, what we changed and the source we checked.

Who we are, and how to reach us

PORKER is an independent civic-information website. It isn’t part of any government, campaign, party or PAC. It’s free to use, has no ads, and never sells or rents personal data. See About, Terms and Privacy.

Questions, corrections or suggestions: support@porker.vote