How problems are ranked
Two different numbers
Severity — how much damage the problem does. A property of the problem.
Priority — what the movement should work on next. A property of the movement, and not the same thing: a severe problem nobody can currently make progress on may rank below a smaller one that is one good bill away from being fixed.
Keeping them apart stops a familiar failure: a list sorted purely by outrage, where everything is at the top and nothing gets done.
What citizens move
Citizens vote, and the vote orders what the movement looks at first.
It does not silently reweight the numbers that feed published findings about named living people. That distinction runs through the whole product — the same rule governs problem laws and good laws — and the reason is the same each time: a popular vote quietly adjusting an award would turn the arithmetic into a poll, which is the instrument the movement exists to replace.
Ordering is exactly the right thing for citizens to control. It is the movement's attention, and attention should follow the people doing the work.
What actually raises a problem's rank
Root causes somebody can draft against. A problem with five sharp causes attracts fix bills. A problem with one vague one does not.
Coverage gaps with names. A visible unclosed cause is the most actionable thing on the site.
Evidence arriving. Problems are joined to the decisions that evidence them; a problem accumulating sourced decisions is a problem getting more real.
Tractability. Whether there is a plausible path from here to fixed.
The status lifecycle
Problems move through states, and the record shows where each one is. A problem that has been solved is not deleted — the movement keeps what it worked on and what happened, because a catalog that only shows open items has quietly erased its own track record.
Why the list stays short
The same discipline as the law lists. A catalog of five hundred problems is a mood. Each record is meant to be something a citizen could actually pick up and work on this month, and the ranking exists to tell them which one.