Worrisome Challengers
Not every challenger is an improvement. Worrisome Challengers is the roster where a citizen files a sourced worry about somebody asking for power — under their own name, and wherever possible with a clip a stranger can watch and judge for themselves. It exists so the movement aims the same instrument at people it likes and people it does not.
What it does
A worrisome challenger is a person running for public office whom a citizen has raised a sourced worry about. They hold no office, and they are not somebody the movement is recommending. This is not a separate kind of record: the roster is a field on the one politician record, one key namespace and one schema, so a worrisome challenger is read with the same qualification areas and the same awards as everybody else. Win the seat and you move onto the elected roster under the same permanent key, judged by roll calls from then on.
Filing is two separate actions, not one form. Page one files the person — only a name is required, the worry paragraph is optional, and submitting creates the filing there and then. Page two adds video, one clip at a time, on a page you can link to and return to. Splitting the two is deliberate: a citizen who has a real worry but cannot find the clip today files the worry now and adds the video when they find it, instead of walking away with it unfiled.
Each video carries the live qualification catalog — the same named areas, in the same order, every other assessment uses. Clicking one of the two direction marks on a row claims that area: reassuring for what the clip shows going right, concerning for what it shows going wrong. Most rows are left alone, because a video usually speaks to one or two areas.
A direction is a citizen's claim about a video, and never a number. It routes evidence instead of producing a verdict: each area shows its two piles of video separately, so the concerning clips and the reassuring ones are never averaged together. The movement's own 0–10 assessment of an area stays an admin's judgement and renders an em dash until one is written, however many videos sit beside it.
A record filed with no video at all is accepted, and then carries a stated "No video evidence" label permanently — on the roster row, on the record page, in the admin's review — until somebody fills the gap. Nothing about a named person is published until an admin approves it, citizen filings never reach the public data repository, and a decline carries a reason the citizen reads verbatim.
The goal it serves
The movement's argument is that measurement beats assertion, and that only holds if the instrument gets aimed in both directions. A citizen handed a list of good challengers and never shown the worrying ones is being sold something; a replacement pipeline that only ever recommends is a campaign tool wearing a lab coat. This roster holds the movement's own recruitment to the standard it demands of incumbents, which is what lets Replacing Captured Incumbents read as a method rather than a pitch.
The second reason is where the evidence is thinnest. An incumbent leaves roll calls behind, dated and official. A challenger leaves speeches. Somebody asking for power for the first time is the person about whom the least is on the record and the most is being claimed — which is why Good New Leaders and this roster are read against the same published Qualifications. The difference between the two is what the record says, not which instrument was used.
The third is restraint. A public worry about a living person is the most consequential thing a citizen can submit here, so the flow is built to make it watchable rather than loud: state what you have, name what you do not, let a reader weigh it. Evidence carries that argument in full.
What keeps it honest
- Filing is the one contribution an anonymous user is refused. Reading the roster stays open to everybody, including the local default user who never signs in. Filing does not, on either page, by any route. An anonymous negative claim about a named living person is the one defect a review queue cannot repair afterwards: nobody to question, and nobody whose standing is at stake when the worry does not hold up.
- State what the record shows, never what the person is. "Said on video, on this date, that he would sign the pledge, and then declined to" is publishable. "Is dishonest" is not.
- Nobody here is endorsed, and the roster is excluded from the seat-slate run. The movement does not put forward somebody it is worried about.
- Filing earns a citizen nothing until an admin approves. A declined filing stays worth nothing, permanently, and an approved one is worth exactly what naming a good leader is worth — a worry that outbid a recommendation would be a machine for producing worries.
- An unassessed area renders unassessed, because publishing a zero the movement never assessed would be a false claim about a person.
- Removal is real. Somebody no longer running, or whose worry did not hold up, is moved off with a stated reason, and the file leaves the public repository in a commit that says why.
Works with
- The Rosters — the fourth of four, sharing one record type and one permanent key with the rest so all four stay comparable.
- The Politician Record Page — where the worry, the qualification areas and the two piles of video per area are rendered.
- Your Seats And The Seat Map — a challenger with a filed worry appears in your seat view without being recommended there.
Where to go next
- Good New Leaders — the other challenger roster, same instrument, positive finding.
- Qualifications — the named areas and published rubrics both rosters are read against.
- Challengers first — why the replacement gets found before the incumbent gets argued about.
- Naming the gaps — the general rule this roster turns on its own intake.
- Take Action — what a citizen can do this week, including vetting a challenger and adding video.