Search The Record

One search box sits in the header of every page, and it does a single job: you type a name, and it takes you to that record. It reaches both politician rosters and all three law libraries. It keeps no record of what you typed — not for a signed-in citizen, not for a visitor who never signed in, not for anyone.

Two typed characters query an index that lives inside the app itself, built by reading the same four stores the list pages read, and nothing about the query is written back anywhere.

What it does

The box searches four stores at once. Both politician rosters are in it — the people who have held office and left a roll-call record, and the people worth electing who never have. So are all three law libraries: the problem law groups, the good law campaigns, and the movement's own fix bills, the legislative language nobody in Congress has filed.

The index is built by reading through the same services the list pages render from. That is what makes it safe to trust: it cannot know something a page does not know, and it cannot hide something a page shows. A hit is by construction a page that already exists and is already public. It builds on the first search and refreshes at most once a minute.

It runs inside the app's own backend, in memory. An outside search cluster was considered and rejected: this product has to run on a citizen's own computer with no external services, and the corpus is a few thousand records. A separate search server would have been the heaviest thing in the product, guarding the smallest pile of data in it. Nothing about search reaches out to anyone.

Matching is built for someone typing a half-remembered name. It matches on prefixes, so results refresh live from the second character, and it carries light fuzziness, so a misspelled surname still lands. The title field weighs more than the detail text, because a citizen typing a name wants the person, not a law whose summary happens to mention them.

• A result is one row: a kind label — Politician, Good law, Problem law, Fix bill — the title, and one muted line of detail. Choosing it clears the box and opens the record.
• Hits are capped at twenty. This is navigation, not analysis; the exhaustive list is what the list pages are for.
• When nothing matches, the empty state names what was searched, so an honest zero never reads as a broken box.
• When a page's header is crowded, the box collapses to a magnifier button that opens the same search in a popover. It is the header's lowest-priority occupant and yields space first.

The goal it serves

The argument this site makes is that you never have to take anyone's word for anything, because the record on a named person and a named law is public, sourced, and checkable by you. That dies at the last inch if someone who came to check one representative cannot find them in ten seconds. Evidence nobody can reach is not evidence, and a library of the record with no way in is not a library.

It also has to work for someone who has committed to nothing, which is why search is never gated. A logged-out visitor, a signed-in citizen, and someone running the software on their own laptop get identical hits. The first thing a skeptical person does is look up their own representative and test our account against what they already know. Asking for an account first would be asking for trust before offering any.

The rest is a commitment rather than a feature. We tell people to go look up who represents them, so the objection is obvious: a movement that kept a log of who looked up whom would be building the instrument it exists to argue against. Quiet records of ordinary behavior, held by somebody else, available later to whoever asks. So the box writes nothing — no query log, no per-citizen history, no saved searches. It is the same reasoning that puts the whole product on your own computer by default, and it is why this project can name the American version of a social credit system without generating the same exhaust.

What keeps it honest

• Results are never filtered by who is asking. There is no personalization here and no place to put one, so nobody sees a different version of the record from their neighbor's.
• It cannot surface what a list page could not. A pending proposal, an unapproved record, or anything from a citizen's own profile is not in the index, because it is not on a public page.
• A store that fails to read is named, not covered up. If one of the four cannot be read, that is logged and the store is absent from the index until it can be, rather than reported as empty.
• If search ever grows a write, that write is a different surface. Saved searches or notifications about a record would be contributions, and would take the movement's full sign-in rules. The read box stays open regardless.
• It judges nothing. Search computes no award and reaches no conclusion about any person. It gets you to the page; the page carries the arithmetic and the sources.

Works with

• Decisions, Areas And Communities — every decision you record is about one specific law or one specific person, and the header box is how you reach that record from wherever you are.
• Value Systems And Policy Packets — writing your own rules means naming the laws you want them applied to, and search is how you find each one by title.
• The First-Principles AI Check — the check runs on a record you had to arrive at first, and it is the opposite kind of surface: search navigates and never reasons about what it found.

Where to go next

• Politicians — what is published about a named person, and the wall that keeps the two bodies of evidence apart.
• Laws — the map of the four different things called law here, which is also the map of what the box searches.
• Find who represents you — the first search most people run.
• Good New Leaders — the other roster in the index: people worth electing who have no voting record yet.
• Open the app — type a name into the header and read the record yourself.