Your State House, Same Instrument
Your state legislature passes the laws you meet first: what a landlord may do, what a ballot has to prove, what a small business has to file. It is also the level of American government almost nobody watches. This is the same instrument the movement uses on Congress, aimed at state chambers instead — the same act categories, the same equation, its own policy file, and its own refusal to guess who cast a vote.
What it does
This is a question of scope, not a fourth award. The same classifier reads a state act as reads a federal one, into the same twelve categories, through the same weighted average and the same floors. Only the corpus and the price list change: state acts are priced from a separate state policy file whose values ship as exact copies of the federal ones, with a build check that prints any difference between the two.
Getting the record is three jobs, and only one may ever be cited. A finder answers whether a roll call exists. A locator says where the state published it. A citation is the state's own bytes, fetched by us, and it is the only thing a committed row may point at. All fifty states have a reachable vote-bearing host, so transport is nearly solved. Identity is not, and identity is the work.
The state wall is the containment rule this level needed and the federal one never did. A member is charged only for instruments of their own state, only for roll calls of a chamber they sat in, only for a session they served in. Fifty corpora share one directory tree, and a leak between them does not look like a bug — it looks like a Minnesota representative with a California record. So a build guard enforces it.
Then the surname problem. State journals print surnames, and no state legislator has a federal identity number — there is no such thing and there never will be. Where the printed form matches two sitting members, the row resolves to nobody: filed separately, counted into the totals and the coverage denominator, charged to no one, and said out loud on the law page — 2 of 134 recorded votes could not be resolved to a named member from the journal alone.
Your own seat comes from a ZIP-to-district crosswalk built on the Census Bureau's relationship file; a split ZIP resolves nothing and asks which district you vote in. Where a district elects two members by ballot position, which position somebody holds comes from certified election results or from nowhere.
Out of it comes a Monkey Award and a Llama Award over that person's state acts, with the act count beside them. Someone who served at both levels also gets a career pair: one weighted average over the union of their acts, each priced by its own level's table, never the mean of the two rows above it. Transcripts and public commitments feed the Flamingo Award only.
The goal it serves
Accountability that stops at Congress stops above the laws most people actually live under. The movement held identity records for more than seven thousand sitting state legislators, and every one carried a line saying there was no mechanism to read their votes. That was a hole, not a boundary: those people cast recorded votes on instruments already filed as problems, and the product built to measure what politicians did was measuring none of it.
It is also where replacement is cheapest. A captured incumbent is removed at an election, and state races are the ones a citizen can reach — closer, smaller, decided by fewer votes than any federal seat. See Voting Records for how the record is read, Elected Politicians for what one looks like, and Replacing Captured Incumbents for what is done with it.
The refusal matters as much as the coverage. Measuring below Congress multiplies the chances to say something perfectly true about the wrong person, because a state journal hands you a surname where Congress hands you an identifier. The Monkey Award and the Llama Award are worth something only if the person under them is the right one, so the wall comes down to this level unchanged rather than relaxed to open states faster.
What keeps it honest
- Turning a state on is an approval, not a side effect. A coverage file records who decided it, when, and why. Today one state is on; two more have full rosters and no instrument corpus behind them, and their rows say so.
- Forty-nine states report "not covered," not "not yet assessed." Those records carry a typed cause and a sourcing sentence. None renders as a zero, because a zero would mean we looked.
- A thin record is published with its denominator. Fewer than three acts marks an award low-confidence and the act count leads the page. Where a member's terms of service are unsourced, the page says unknown (tenure not sourced) rather than substituting the acts we happened to find.
- No model output reaches a state award — not about a person, not about an instrument. Every number traces to a roll call cited to the chamber's own journal and to decisions a named administrator made in the open.
- Undecided is stated, not skipped. In the covered state, eight roll calls are declared and two have been decided as counting. The other six are named as undecided — a work item, not a silence.
Works with
- Show The Arithmetic — the same published equation, so any number here adds up by hand.
- Say What We Could See — unresolved surnames and uncovered states are published as named gaps.
- Work You Can Watch — sourcing a chamber or resolving a surname is work a citizen can pick up.
Where to go next
- Voting Records — how a recorded vote becomes an award percentage.
- Where the data comes from — the official record or nothing.
- Find who represents you — your seats, federal and state.
- The sourcing rule — why a citation is the state's own bytes, never a summary.
- Take Action — the work that turns an uncovered chamber into a covered one.