How It Works

How Poliratr Works

POLIRATR™ transforms publicly available congressional data into clear, actionable civic intelligence. Every feature is built on official government sources — no editorial input, no opinion, no bias.

Your Civic Dashboard

Enter your zip code and Poliratr builds a personalized dashboard for your congressional district.

The MyPoliratr tab is your home screen. It shows:

Your district is automatically resolved from your zip code using U.S. Census geocoding for accurate representation.

PoliScore™

A proprietary 5-dimension grading system that evaluates legislators on process and performance — not ideology, party loyalty, or policy positions.

Every member of Congress receives a composite letter grade based on five peer-normalized dimensions:

Engagement Voting attendance, amendment activity, and committee participation
Effectiveness Bills introduced and advanced through the legislative process
Bipartisanship Cross-party cosponsorship and collaborative legislating
Fiscal Transparency Campaign finance patterns, small-donor percentage, and PAC dependency
Accountability Missed vote rate and financial disclosure completeness

How grading works: Each dimension is normalized against a peer group of legislators with the same chamber, party status, and seniority level. This means a freshman House member is compared to other freshmen, not 30-year Senate veterans. The composite score is a weighted average of all five dimensions, converted to a letter grade:

A — 80th+ percentile B — 60th–79th C — 40th–59th D — 20th–39th F — Below 20th

Each member profile displays a radar chart, individual dimension bars with percentile scores, and a "Limited Data" badge when a member's record is incomplete (e.g., newly sworn-in members).

Key principle: A high PoliScore means active, effective participation in the legislative process — regardless of political views. We measure how well they do the job, not what they believe.

PoliStance™

Automatically derived policy positions based entirely on voting patterns — zero editorial input.

PoliStance analyzes a legislator's career-wide roll-call votes across policy domains (Defense, Healthcare, Taxes, Education, Immigration, Environment, and more) to identify consistent patterns:

Each stance shows a consistency percentage and the number of votes analyzed. A 75%+ consistency rate is labeled "Strong." Stances build over time as more votes are recorded — new members may show a "Building..." state until sufficient data accumulates.

No human assigns these labels. They are computed directly from the public voting record.

State Congressional Performance

See how your state's entire congressional delegation ranks against all 50 states.

The State Performance card on your MyPoliratr dashboard shows:

Rankings include U.S. territories and non-voting delegates where applicable, noted with an asterisk.

Congressional Activity Feed

A chronological record of legislative activity organized by year and month.

The Activity tab provides a structured feed of the current Congress, including:

A visual bill pipeline shows how many bills sit at each stage: Introduced → Committee → Advancing → Voted → Signed. Each feed entry links to its official source and the member profile of the bill's sponsor.

Officials Directory

Browse and search all 535+ members of Congress.

The Officials tab provides a searchable directory with:

Tapping any member opens their full profile with a card-based layout covering every dimension of their congressional record.

Our Data Sources

Every data point in Poliratr is sourced from official U.S. government databases.

We pull from:

Congress.gov API FEC.gov API House Clerk XML BioGuide.Congress.gov U.S. Census Geocoder Vote.gov

Data is refreshed regularly through an automated pipeline. We never modify, editorialize, or selectively present source data.

Privacy & Security

Your political interests are yours alone.

Read our full Privacy Policy for details.