How VotersRight works — and how to check it

Every vote on VotersRight comes from a verified U.S. resident — not an anonymous click. To cast a vote you complete a three-step check: a one-time passcode sent to a U.S. mobile number, a residential address resolved to a Congressional district, and a Solana wallet provisioned to your account so your position can be recorded on a public ledger.

One phone number maps to one address; changing your address requires re-verification. We store a salted hash of your phone number, never the raw number, and we never sell or share it. What we can't promise is perfection: a determined individual could obtain multiple numbers. Section 06 describes how we detect the coordinated burst patterns that abuse at scale would produce.

A heartbeat is the live tally of verified constituents who have taken a Yes/No position on their senator, alongside the reason they cite. Each position is written to a Solana smart contract as an on-chain record — not a private number in our database that you have to take on faith. The heartbeat you see is a cached aggregate of those on-chain records, refreshed within seconds.

These constituent positions are distinct from a senator's official roll-call votes in Congress. Those come from Congress.gov (Section 03) and appear separately on each senator's page. You can verify any heartbeat count yourself against the chain — see Section 08.

Everything we publish about a senator traces to a named public source, linked inline on their page. We ingest on a schedule, timestamp every capture, and cite the original record on every figure. A machine-readable sample export of what we publish — no account required — is available below, in JSON or CSV.

We treat errors as a public ratchet, not a private embarrassment. Anyone can report an error on any data point inline — no account required — and we triage within 24 hours. When we correct something, the original wording, the corrected wording, the date, and the reasoning are published permanently to the Public Correction Archive (Section 07). Politicians' offices have a separate, identity-verified correction channel.

VotersRight is independent. We are not affiliated with, funded by, or operated on behalf of any political party, candidate, campaign, or political action committee. We use no red/blue partisan framing anywhere on the platform — a senator's party appears only as a neutral letter label.

A full funding disclosure — who pays for VotersRight, and how — will be published here before public launch.

Trust requires proof that we tried to break ourselves. Before public launch we will run adversarial "sybil" tests that simulate burner-phone farms and coordinated voting bursts, then publish the results — pass or fail, including methodology and detection thresholds — so you can judge the platform's detection posture rather than take our word for it.

See the published integrity-test results. If we ever detect a real coordination attempt in production, we commit to publishing it as a transparency report (Section 09).

Every correction we have ever issued is public and permanent — sorted most-recent first, each showing the original wording, the corrected wording, the date, and the reasoning for the change. Nothing is quietly edited away.

The voting smart contract is the source of truth for every heartbeat. It is currently deployed to the Solana devnet cluster for testing. The audited mainnet program and the independent security-audit report are in progress; both the mainnet program ID and the published audit will appear here before public launch.

Honesty about what we cannot do builds more trust than overstating what we can. VotersRight cannot detect off-platform vote-buying, coercion, or offline organizing campaigns — activity that never touches our system is invisible to us. We verify that a vote comes from a real, district-resolved U.S. resident (Section 01); we cannot see what happened to that person before they arrived, who paid them, or who pressured them off-platform. We name that limit plainly rather than imply a completeness we don't have.

What aggregate-trend analysis would surface is a coordinated pattern: a sudden statewide flip with no corresponding news event, for instance, stands out against a normal trend line. To be clear about what this is and isn't — it is a detection posture, an approach we would apply, not a live anomaly-detection system we are claiming to run against your data today. We describe the approach so you can hold us to it, not so you'll assume it is already deployed.

If we ever detect a real coordination attempt in production, we commit to publishing it as a transparency report — what we saw, how we saw it, and what we did — rather than quietly handling it. The same commitment runs the other way: we will publish the adversarial "sybil" test results that exercise this posture before we claim it works (Section 06).

Every weekly digest we publish is cryptographically signed with an Ed25519 key the moment it goes live. The signature covers the digest's exact content — its headline, summary, body, and the ranked movers — so anyone can confirm a number or a quote attributed to VotersRight actually came from us, unaltered. If someone doctors a screenshot of a digest and changes a figure, the signature no longer matches the content, and the forgery is detectable by anyone, not just us.

Verification needs nothing private. The signature and the public key travel with the published digest; you reconstruct the signed message from the public fields, then check the signature against the public key below. We never expose the private signing seed — only its public half is published here.