Accuracy & corrections
A record is only worth what its errors cost it
The feeds exist to be a trustworthy record, which means the accuracy rules aren't a policy page written after the fact — they are how the system is built. The governing principle, verbatim from the project's engineering docs: a wrong claim is worse than a hedged or omitted one.
The rules the pipeline enforces
How posts stay honest
- Official sources only. Posts are generated from Congress.gov and from the EU's official registers (the European Parliament's open-data service, the Publications Office, and the OEIL Legislative Observatory) — never from news coverage or social media.
- Numbers are never written by AI. Vote tallies, dates, bill numbers and budget figures are copied from the record verbatim. If the record lacks a number, the line is omitted — not estimated.
- Fail closed. When an action in the record is ambiguous — a procedural step the classifier can't confidently place — the system logs it and stays silent rather than guessing on air.
- Real clocks only. "The President has ten days (Sundays excepted)" is a constitutional fact, so the feed states it. Trilogue timing is not published, so the feed says that instead of inventing a timetable.
- Uncertainty stays in words. Genuine branch points are marked "expected", "possible", "if and when" — likelihood claims always carry their basis, and never dress a guess as a fact.
- AI is labeled. The plain-English summaries are AI-written and carry an explicit [AI-Generated] tag, positioned so it can never be misread as labeling the procedural facts, which are not AI-written.
- Non-binding means saying so. Parliamentary resolutions that change no law always carry "non-binding" in the post; a political agreement is never called a law, and "in force" is never conflated with "applies to you now".
When we get it wrong
Corrections are visible, never silent
Automated systems reading government databases will sometimes be wrong — because of our own bugs, and sometimes because the record itself is amended after the fact. What we promise is not perfection; it's that no error is fixed quietly. An erroneous post is corrected in the open — deleted and reposted with a note, or corrected in a reply — and every confirmed correction is listed below, with sources.
Report an error
Spotted a discrepancy between a post and the official record? Email accuracy@billtracking.org with a link to the post and to the official source. Every report is read.
Credit, if you want it. Confirmed reports are credited in the log entry — your name or your X handle, your choice, and only if you explicitly opt in. Reports are otherwise anonymous. (For students: a credited correction to a public record is a nice thing to be able to link to. Instructors — there's a ready-made exercise built on exactly this.)
Corrections log
No corrections logged yet. The feeds are young; this log is where every confirmed correction will appear — dated, described, sourced, and credited where the reporter opted in. An empty log this early is expected. A log that stays empty forever would mean nobody is checking — please do.