How badness is rated

Each problem law carries a badness rating from 1 to 100. It is the weight the law brings into every calculation downstream, so it is worth being precise about where the number comes from.

What the number means

The rating answers one question: how much of the damage to representative democracy is attributable to this law? A 95 is a law that closed a door the public cannot reopen. A 20 is a law that made something worse at the margin.

It is not a measure of how angry the law makes people, how much coverage it got, or how recent it is. An old law that is still doing the damage rates higher than a new one that made headlines.

Who sets it, and what citizens move

• The rating is proposed with the record and carries its reasoning in the file.
• Citizens vote on it. The vote is real and it is public.
• The vote orders the list — it decides what a citizen sees first, and what the movement argues about next.

That distinction is deliberate. Letting a popular vote directly set the multiplier on a number we publish about named living people would make the arithmetic a popularity contest, and a popularity contest is exactly the thing this movement exists to replace.

The vehicle problem

Damaging provisions are often buried inside bills nobody could vote against — a defense authorisation, an appropriations package, a must-pass continuing resolution. The record captures which vehicle carried the provision as context, and it stays context: it is shown to the reader and it does not enter the arithmetic. A citizen deserves to know that a representative's yes vote was a yes on a 4,000-page package. They also deserve to know the provision passed.