Methodology

• KEPT — The politician took the action they promised.
• PARTIAL — Some action toward the promise, but incomplete delivery, OR outcome blocked by opposing party despite their full effort.
• BROKEN — The politician's own vote or action contradicted the promise.
• YOU DECIDE — Outcome depends on the reader's interpretive framework. Used sparingly.

Every politician profile passes through three sequential reviewers — each a separate, isolated reasoning pass with a distinct partisan-perspective brief:

1. 1
   Neutral researcher

   Pulls campaign promises from primary sources — campaign websites via the Wayback Machine, debate transcripts, voter-guide questionnaires. For each promise, searches the legislative record and cross-spectrum news. Assigns a verdict backed by at least 2 primary sources.

2. 2
   Conservative-perspective reviewer

   Stress-tests the profile for left-leaning bias, missing context, and unfair verdicts. Flags any framing a thoughtful conservative reader would object to.

3. 3
   Progressive-perspective reviewer

   Mirror-image — stress-tests for right-leaning bias, missing accountability moments, and overly generous framings.

A profile is only published when both partisan reviewers return zero high-severity objections. Disagreements trigger a re-run of the research pass with both critiques as context. Full review logs are stored as an audit trail.

On the underlying technology: the research and review passes are run by current-generation language-model systems with web-search access. They are not the source of authority — primary records and public votes are. The reviewers exist to catch one-sided framing in the writeup; the receipts themselves do the load-bearing work.

When a promised outcome was prevented by the opposing party — filibuster, refusal to take up, presidential veto, courts — the verdict considers whether the politician took the actions available within their caucus's power.

BROKEN is reserved for cases where the politician's own actions prevented the outcome. When obstruction came from outside their caucus's control AND they took the maximally available procedural action, the verdict is PARTIAL with the obstructing party named explicitly. The rule applies symmetrically to politicians of both parties.

Not every profile receives the full 3-pass adversarial review. We use a two-tier system:

• Full review — Research pass + Conservative-perspective reviewer + Progressive-perspective reviewer + adjudication when reviewers disagree. Reserved for politicians most likely to be screenshot-mocked if biased: leadership, presidential candidates, partisan flanks, controversial figures.
• Standard review — Single research pass with the stable prompt. Produces the same primary-source receipts but does not run the adversarial reviewers. Used for rank-and-file politicians where the marginal cost of full review exceeds the marginal benefit.
• Sourced from the SEALED book — Scorecard imported from the SEALED Press book's full case-study research (currently: Trump 2016).

Auto-upgrade by reader interest: we track page-view counts on individual politician pages. When a Standard-review profile crosses a traffic threshold (currently set at 1,000 monthly views, subject to revision), it gets queued for promotion to Full review. The rationale: profiles that draw real reader attention deserve the deeper editorial process, and bias is more consequential where more readers see it.

Every politician page shows its current tier in the sidebar. You can see exactly what level of review the verdicts received.

When a promise has documented real-world stakes — number of people affected, dollar amounts, casualties — those stakes are named explicitly in the case study, regardless of whether they help or hurt the politician. Symmetric stakes-naming applies across both KEPT and BROKEN verdicts. Selectively-cited political quotes are treated as equivalent to manufactured paraphrase.

Found a factual error? Email disputes@campaignreceipts.com with the politician's name, the specific verdict, and the source you believe contradicts our finding. We respond within 7 days. Verified corrections are applied with a public changelog.