How JustMeasure Works

JustMeasure is a political accountability tool that gathers public data from official congressional voting records and bill metadata. Candidate rankings come from those votes.

Bill summaries and tags are drafted to classify:

• what a bill is about
• what the vote appears to do in practical terms
• how the bill may relate to specific biblical and moral concerns already defined by the project

That step uses Claude Haiku 5.5 (anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5), prompt bill-enrichment-v6.1, temperature 0.1. The model sees the bill id, title, summary, policy area, latest action, chamber, and source URL, plus tags already on the bill. It does not see the sponsor or the sponsor's party. Appropriations, war funding, omnibus bills, a family-policy tag paired with life or child protection, recommit motions, continuing appropriations, and titles that say “for other purposes” beside appropriations or an authorization go to Claude Sonnet 5.5 (anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5). So do mixed or unclear readings, a bill marked needs review, and any restraint-lane command the first model flags.

A bill marked needs review does not score until a person reviews it. On the restraint lane, a low-confidence result does not score. An ordinary tag is not held back only because confidence is low. The moral rules are human-written. Verses on ordinary tags are human-authored. Restraint citations have to be on a fixed list. The model does not create the moral standard.

Roll calls come from the House Clerk and Senate LIS. Bills and CRS summaries come from the Congress.gov API. Names and offices come from FEC bulk files. Sitting members are checked against the House Clerk member list and the Senate contact list.

Ballot briefs are separate from candidate rankings. They grade the Yes and No options on a public measure with the same Scripture standard and the same five restraint tests used for bills. No means current law. The only leans are Yes and No. A measure is judged only as written. A protection the text leaves out counts against the measure. A close call still gets a pick and names the two lanes in tension. Watch notes never change the lean. On close calls that Scripture does not settle, we presume against adding unchecked coercive power. This deliberately weighs the risk of government overreach above the risk of government under-protection. Scripture counts both as real failures (Proverbs 17:15; Romans 13:4), and a Christian who weighs them the other way is not departing from Scripture. Unchecked means a power with no standard of proof, required finding, time limit or review in the same text. The tiebreaker is applied the same way to every measure. It is tagged Prudential judgment. Scripture doesn't settle it; Christians may vote either way. Every tiebreaker lean names the under-protection cost of the option it picks. Westminster Confession of Faith 20 is counsel to conscience. It is not the tiebreaker's warrant. In Tennessee, a blank on an amendment works like a No for anyone voting for governor (Tennessee Constitution, Article XI, Section 3; Tennessee Secretary of State). This is the counting rule. It is not a request to vote. Claude Haiku 5.5 proposes the lanes. A person reviews them. A brief moves from draft, to draft reviewed, to published. These briefs are counsel to conscience (Westminster Confession of Faith 20.2). They do not score voters and they do not enter legislator rankings. See Ballot briefs.

My Ballot is the voting-booth cheat sheet. It is its own page. Senate races are Class II seats, whose terms end January 3, 2027 (Senate contact list, retrieved October 19, 2026; Class II), plus two sourced specials: Florida, Ashley Moody (Florida Division of Elections), and Ohio, Jon Husted, unexpired term ending January 3, 2029 (Ohio Secretary of State Directive 2026-18). Every U.S. House seat is on the ballot (U.S. Const. art. I, §2). Only those incumbents are graded. Challengers and newcomers are not named and are not scored.

Bills affect rankings when they are mapped into reviewed scoring categories and marked ready for scoring. A bill marked needs review does not score until a person reviews it. Presidential nominations (ids that start with pn-) and House simple resolutions (hres-) are not graded. A Congressional Review Act disapproval does not score unless a reviewed enrichment marks it ready to score.

From there, JustMeasure ranks candidates using a three-tier system.

Tier 1: Hard disqualifiers

Tier 1 marks a record Disqualifying vote on record when either of these is true:

• a yea for a non-bundled bill tagged abortion, child sexual corruption, bloodguilt, or open corruption, on final passage or an amendment at full weight, or on cloture, a motion to proceed, or discharge when the direction is known
• a nay on cloture, the motion to proceed, or final passage of a clean bill that defends life or protects children, when that member has no yea on final passage or an amendment of the same bill

A yea on cloture is not substantive support. A later substantive yea keeps a cloture nay at Tier 2. Clean means the known content includes that protection and no unrelated major tag. Family policy is always a companion. Abuse accountability is a companion only together with child protection. Unknown content is not clean. A reviewer-verified overreach provision, a reviewed Tier 2 cap, or a bundled bill blocks Tier 1. The event stores 100. It is not reduced by the vote-type multiplier. Sponsoring such a bill can disqualify. Cosponsoring scores at half weight and is not Tier 1 by itself.

Tier 2: Grave compromise

Tier 2 looks for patterns of grave compromise, such as repeated support for:

• war funding or foreign entanglement
• debt expansion and inflationary spending
• omnibus packaging that hides accountability
• surveillance or coercive state power

Those patterns are scored as a lane profile, not as a running total. Each lane's rate is the member's residual divided by the exposure on bills in that lane, times the heaviest penalty weight that fired in that lane in the member's chamber. The lanes are summed. Repeating the same compromise inside one lane does not pile the weights up. With no Tier 1 failure, a lane-profile score of 45 or more is Grave pattern on record. A score of 20 or more, and below 45, is Compromises on record. Debt and war-funding lanes count at half weight. Omnibus, appropriations, and surveillance stay at full weight.

Surveillance still scores: a yea is a Tier 2 penalty of 15, and a nay is a credit of 8. Speech protection, religious liberty, and due process score at 8 either way. The restraint lane (Westminster Confession of Faith 20.4) tests both the bill and current law with the same five tests. Only a Scripture command can cost points, both models must agree, and low confidence on that lane does not score. The lane weight would be 15 and a credit 8, but the reviewed outcome stored no penalties across 417 bills, so the lane has changed no score. The notes are not on bill pages yet.

Three-vote minimum. Tier 2 measures a pattern, and a pattern needs more than one witness: "a matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses" (Deuteronomy 19:15). Each Tier 2 lane (life, children, honest money, war and peace, and so on) gets its full weight only when a member has cast at least 3 distinct scored roll-call votes in it. With fewer, the lane counts proportionally: 1 vote counts at 1/3 weight, 2 votes at 2/3. The candidate breakdown shows this, for example "life 16.7 (1 of 3 required votes, so 1/3 weight; 100% of 50)". Tier 1 disqualifiers are not affected.

Overreach provisions. Some protective bills also hand the government a power that Scripture does not give it, such as a deadline to take down content with no appeal, or seizing property without a conviction. A member can vote against such a bill without voting against the protection. When a reviewer has checked the bill text and quoted the provision, the bill is treated like a bundled bill. A nay on it is never a Tier 1 disqualifier, and its Tier 2 penalties count at half weight. The provision has to be a means of enforcement, never the bill's ban on the harm itself. For example, S. 146 (TAKE IT DOWN Act) is flagged for its 48-hour takedown rule with no counter-notice.

Contested credits and tier-2 nays at 25. When a member votes against the penalized side on a genuinely contested final vote (final passage, a conference report, or cloture when the bill had neither, with at least 10% of yea and nay votes on the losing side), that vote earns a credit in the same lane. The test uses vote margins only, never party. A credit can offset at most half of a lane's Tier 2 penalties on other bills, never penalties from bundled bills, and never counts toward the three-vote minimum. Credits never affect Tier 1. Separately, a bill a reviewer has capped at Tier 2 counts at half weight, so a nay on a 50-weight protective bill counts 25, except H.R. 498 and H.R. 3492. Both stay capped at tier 2, so they can never be a Tier 1 or disqualifying event, and they count at full tier-2 weight. Their exposure and their points are not halved, for any member. A bundled bill keeps its own half weight; the two are never combined.

Tier 3: Positive fitness

Tier 3 looks for positive fitness, meaning evidence that a candidate:

• actively defends life
• protects children
• supports accountability and truth-telling
• resists unjust war and favors de-escalation
• shows stronger stewardship and independence from corrupt systems

Candidates who clear Tier 1 and Tier 2 can then be ranked more positively based on those strengths. In other words, positive points do not erase direct support for grave evil.

Debt, spending and war-funding votes count as prudential compromises at reduced weight. By themselves they can produce 'Compromises on record' but never 'Grave pattern on record.' They count at full weight when the bill or record shows a named injustice: debasing money, defaulting on debts already owed, or funding unauthorized or documented unjust war (Leviticus 19:35-36; Psalm 37:21; Westminster Confession 23.2; Habakkuk 2:12). We cap these lanes because Scripture governs these areas without settling most individual votes, and the gravest labels must rest on what Scripture plainly forbids.

The national debt is a real burden passed to children who cannot consent to it. A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children (Proverbs 13:22). The eighth commandment requires frugality, and the Westminster Larger Catechism lists it among the duties of that commandment (WLC 141). These votes still count. They count at reduced weight. Together with other marks they can add up to Grave pattern on record. They never produce that label by themselves. The same rule applies to every member.

Omnibus bills, appropriations, and surveillance votes stay at full weight. The reduced weight is the debt and war-funding lanes. A named-injustice tag is not applied to any bill in this record until a human review cites the provision. Until then those votes stay at the reduced weight. The same weight applies to every member.

In the Senate most bills cannot come to a vote on their merits unless sixty senators agree to end debate. When cloture fails, the bill stops. On a bill that does one thing, a nay on cloture is not a scheduling preference. It is the vote that decides whether the protection becomes law. On S. 6, the Born-Alive bill, cloture failed 52-47 on January 22, 2025, and the bill went no further.

We treat such a nay as opposing the protection only when three things are true:

1. The bill is clean. Its only lane is protecting innocent life or children, and review found no unrelated major provision and no overreach provision.
2. The bill adds an enforceable duty, penalty or remedy beyond existing law.
3. The member voted for no clean bill that carries the same protection.

Scripture does not let us excuse a refusal by its form: "If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it?" (Proverbs 24:11-12).

Existing law already covers it. 1 U.S.C. 8 says that a child born alive is a "person" under federal law. It imposes no duty of care and no penalty. A bill that adds those is not redundant. A bill that adds nothing enforceable does not meet our test.

It was a procedural vote. Objections to process can be real. That is why a yea for any clean bill carrying the same protection keeps a member's nay at the lower tier. For each member, the latest vote among cloture, the motion to proceed, and passage governs, including a matched House or Senate vehicle. A supporting latest vote counts as support on every vehicle in that group. An opposing latest vote removes earlier support. A procedural yea on a clean harmful bill is a Tier 1 vote only when there is no later nay on any matched vehicle. The same rule applies to every member.

The text has problems. Concerns about the text belong in the review of the bill. If review finds a real defect, the bill is not clean, and no nay on it counts at this level.

What we do not claim. The ninth commandment forbids "misconstructing intentions, words, and actions" (Westminster Larger Catechism 145). We grade the vote, not the heart. Where a member stated reasons, we link them.

No bill becomes Tier 1 without a human reading of its operative text. H.R. 21 and S. 6 are signed and stand. H.R. 498 is capped at tier 2 so it can never be a Tier 1 or disqualifying event, and it counts at full tier-2 weight. Its exposure and its points are not halved, for any member. It stays a matched vehicle with H.R. 3492. H.R. 3492 has no Tier 1 sign-off. Adam Malin, 2026-10-21: it is mixed. The "otherwise conveying ... medications" clause in (h)(2), combined with aiding-and-abetting law, could reach parents, and the text does not exclude that, so a good-faith Christian could vote nay over that means without opposing the protection. H.R. 3492 is capped at tier 2 on the same terms: it can never be a Tier 1 or disqualifying event, it counts at full tier-2 weight, and its exposure and its points are not halved, for any member. It stays a matched vehicle with H.R. 498. A bill with no sign-off cannot newly become Tier 1. The same rule applies to every member.

Motions to table, to discharge, and to concur are read by polarity in both directions. A yea and a nay are each scored as supporting or opposing the bill, according to what that motion does. Tabling, including a motion to table a discharge, opposes the bill. A motion to discharge advances it. Concurrence is passage. A concur vote on a debt-limit or must-pay bill is not scored as a spending yea.

"Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil" (Exodus 23:2) is why a costly vote against one's own caucus is worth noticing. Each card may say "Voted against own caucus on N of M scored votes." The count uses a cohort of at least 10. It is the same descriptive table for every member. It is not a score input, and it does not withhold credits. The same rule applies to every member.

Sponsorship cap. A member who sponsors or cosponsors a measure on our reviewed list cannot be labeled Qualified. In the current Congress the list includes the reviewed bills and resolutions. In the prior Congress, only an operative class-A bill caps the label. Prior-Congress resolutions are notes and do not cap. The window is the current and prior Congress, about four years, because a recent deliberate act of the office stays on the record for one full Congress after. The list covers measures whose text expands access to, funding for, or legal protection of abortion, or of gender-transition interventions for minors. The member's score does not change; the highest label available is Compromised. Each listed measure was read and signed off by a named reviewer. Withdrawn cosponsorships do not count. We apply this because Scripture treats framing unjust law as the lawmaker's own act (Isa 10:1; Ps 94:20), and the sixth commandment requires protecting the innocent (Exod 20:13; Westminster Larger Catechism 135-136). For measures about gender-transition interventions for minors, the same commandment forbids wounding the body (Westminster Larger Catechism 136), and Genesis 1:27 records that male and female he created them. Measures on which faithful Christians disagree (for example IVF, contraception and the Equal Rights Amendment) are not on the list unless a separate, published theology ruling places them there.

This is a lesser label cap for measures that are not Tier 1. Sponsorship of a clean Tier 1 bill can still disqualify under the existing rule. A disqualifying vote on record stays that label. An existing Compromises on record, Grave pattern on record, or Too few scored votes band is unchanged. The cap applies only to a record that would otherwise be Qualified on the 118th–119th Congress record, and it is applied before the tested-record gate.

Sponsoring a protective bill does not earn credit. Protecting life is the baseline duty of the office, and we measure it through recorded votes, which cost more than a cosponsorship.

Earlier record notes, when a member has them, use this closer: This note is shown for completeness. It is not scored. A sponsorship in the 117th Congress or earlier stays a note. Prior-Congress resolutions are notes and do not cap. Operative class-A bills in the current and prior Congress can cap the label. The label window is the current and prior Congress, about four years.

In practice this cap falls on one side. Every measure on the current list was introduced by members of the minority party. Many are messaging bills the majority will not bring to a vote, so a cosponsorship is often the only public record of the member's position. We apply the cap because the act itself is what we measure, not because of who performs it. We also checked the opposite risk: counting contested measures (IVF, contraception, the ERA) would fall mostly on majority-party members, and we excluded them for the same reason, pending a published theology ruling.

Adam Malin signed these eleven measures on 2026-10-22: H.Con.Res. 65, H.R. 12, H.R. 9448, H.R. 10600, H.Res. 238, and H.Res. 1428 of the 119th Congress, and H.R. 12, H.R. 782, H.R. 1723, H.R. 2573, and S. 317 of the 118th Congress. Held entries stay pending and do not cap a label.

Past floor votes on life and on children count at a disclosed prudential weight. A vote in the prior Congress counts at 0.5. A vote two Congresses back counts at 0.25. Nothing older is scored. The weight counts toward the lane minimum: the votes add their weights, not one full vote each. An absence, or a present, on a bill that defends life or children still counts, at that same reduced weight. An absence on a bill that expands abortion does not. Scripture gives no half-life for sin. Recent conduct is better evidence of how a member uses the office now. The numbers 0.5 and 0.25, and the two-Congress limit, are chosen numbers, open to revision. Decay changes the score only. Whether a cap applies does not decay.

A yea to expand abortion in that window caps the label at Compromises on record and does not disqualify. The cap reaches only a record that would otherwise be Qualified on the 118th–119th Congress record. It is applied with the sponsorship cap, before the tested-record gate. S. 4554 is a sense of Congress. It is scored at the 0.5 factor for a non-operative measure, not at a full harm exposure of 100, and a yea still caps the label. H.R. 8297 is scored as a cap only. It is Tier 1 eligible, pending human text review and Adam sign-off, and it is not applied as Tier 1. A past version of a capped bill keeps the 0.5 weight. A nay on a past protection bill is scored at the decayed weight. It does not disqualify, and it is not this cap.

The Respect for Marriage Act yea is tier 2 under family harm, not under children. The lane weight is 50, the same tier-2 weight as life and children, and the 117th Congress vote counts at 0.25 toward the lane minimum. The act contradicts the creation ordinance of marriage (Genesis 1:27; Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-6; Westminster Confession 24.1). Some Christians backed its religious-liberty amendment, and its practical effect largely codified Obergefell. Neither changes what the law declares marriage to be. The Equality Act is held and is not scored. H.R. 5, the Parents Bill of Rights, is family and prudential. The end is commanded (Deuteronomy 6:6-7; Ephesians 6:4; Westminster Larger Catechism 129) and the means are federal mandates on local schools. It is shown with the 0.5 factor. A nay adds no compromise points and does not cost Qualified.

Reserve-fund amendments bind nothing. They are notes, not scores. Endorsing the taking of innocent life is an act against the commandment, while declining a non-binding reserve fund is not. Contraception, IVF, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act stay excluded.

Past penalties mirror whichever party set each Congress's agenda. The agenda decides which questions reach a roll call. We do not tune these rules to equalize outcomes.

The final outcomes, method version 2026-10-20, are:

• Disqualifying vote on record: at least one Tier 1 vote.
• Grave pattern on record: scored votes add up to 45 or more.
• Compromises on record: 20 or more, and below 45.
• Qualified on the 118th–119th Congress record: no Tier 1 vote and under 20 on the 118th–119th Congress record. Every scored vote counts toward the minimum, good or bad, so a negative event still counts and a clean record above the office minimum can pass. This is a screen, not proof of fitness. A sponsor or cosponsor of a reviewed abortion or minors-transition measure cannot receive this label. In the prior Congress, only an operative class-A bill caps the label. Prior-Congress resolutions are notes and do not cap. The window is about four years, because a recent deliberate act of the office stays on the record for one full Congress after. A past yea to expand abortion also caps that label and does not disqualify.
• Not yet tested on life and child-protection votes: the score would be Qualified, and it is unchanged, but there is no recorded yea or nay on a key life or child-protection vehicle. A Qualified label claims a tested record on the gravest votes. Members seated after those votes, or who never cast one, show their score but are not called Qualified until tested.
• Too few scored votes: no scored evidence, no votes, unresolved vote context, fewer votes than the office minimum, or a suppressed duplicate. The office minimum is the lower of 100 and half a typical full record for that office, and it is never below 8. A typical full record is the loaded-vote count at the 75th percentile of members of that office who have at least one vote. A Tier 1 vote still outranks a thin record.
• No incumbent is Qualified when no sitting member on that ballot cleared the screen. We grade sitting members' records only. Other candidates on this ballot have not been graded.

Unsettled means a Grave pattern, Compromises, or Qualified label agrees in fewer than 90 percent of 200 resamples of that chamber's scored bills. The summary is shown in muted type. A Tier 1 vote is a recorded fact and is never marked unsettled.

A Borderline badge marks a label whose lane-profile score is within 3 points of 20 or 45. Exactly 20 is Compromises on record. Exactly 45 is Grave pattern on record. The label itself is unchanged.

When a record has positive-witness points, the card shows them on their own line, such as "Positive witness: 12 points in 2 lanes." Credits do not set the label.

• It uses deterministic scoring rather than black-box rankings.
• It keeps the moral rules separate from the LLM tagging layer.
• It weighs different kinds of votes differently instead of treating every vote as equally revealing.
• It handles multiple votes on the same bill without unfair double-counting.
• It normalizes similar bill tags into a smaller set of reviewed scoring categories.
• It ranks candidates from roll-call votes and from reviewed sponsorship and cosponsorship, not from campaign money, lobbying, or affiliations.
• It is designed to show evidence for why a candidate received a status instead of outputting a mysterious score.

For a fuller explanation of how votes become scores, see the scoring mechanics. For the biblical rationale and Scripture references behind those judgments, see the Doctrine page.

Not covered yet

• Challengers and newcomers are not named and are not scored.
• Presidents, governors, and other executives are not graded from this legislative record. Presidential filings can appear in the office counts. In this snapshot those rows are Too few scored votes.
• State legislators are not covered.
• Committee votes are not covered.
• Presidential nominations are not graded.

Fairness

A positive-fitness credit is withheld when at least 70 percent of the member's caucus cast the same vote, in a cohort of at least 10 (Proverbs 24:11). The rule does not withhold penalties and it never sets a label. Life, child protection, and the other Tier 1-grade concerns stay exempt. An independent is counted with the caucus that person votes with at least 75 percent of the time, over at least 20 votes.

• Procedural votes can be difficult to interpret when the bill context is thin or the vote intent is unclear.
• Drafted tags can be imperfect. A bill marked needs review does not score until a person reviews it.
• A candidate's result may look stronger or weaker depending on how much verified legislative data is actually available for that person.

JustMeasure is meant to improve clarity, not pretend to offer perfect knowledge. Where the record is thin, the system is designed to surface that limitation rather than hide it.