Inside a legacy record

Open any record and you are looking at four layers, stacked from most checkable to least.

Layer 1 — identity

Name, seat, party, term. Boring, and the layer most likely to be wrong for people who changed districts, changed parties, or share a name with somebody else. The frozen key — a slug like barbara_lee_ca — is the identity the rest of the system uses, precisely so that a display-name fix never orphans anything pointing at the record.

Layer 2 — the acts

Every recorded act, classified into exactly one bucket. There are twelve, and they are the crossing of three questions:

• Was it a vote, an authorship, or a block?
• Was it on a problem instrument or a good one?
• Did it advance that instrument or resist it?
• And did it happen on the floor, or in the small room where there is no roll call?

Each act carries its citation. This layer is the one a hostile reader should be able to audit line by line, and it is built to survive that.

Layer 3 — the awards

Two numbers derived from layer 2 by published arithmetic, each with a page that shows the derivation term by term so a citizen can reproduce it with a calculator.

Layer 4 — what we do not have

Coverage gaps, stated. A record with a thin decade says so rather than presenting a confident number computed over a fifth of a career. Confidence is reported, never scored — it is disclosure, and it never silently adjusts the award.

The wall

Nothing outside the voting record touches layers 2 and 3. Interviews, background, education, statements, and qualification assessments feed the Flamingo Award instead, and they never bubble up into Monkey or Llama. That separation is absolute and it is checked in the build.