Money context sits beside a claim's verdict; it never determines it. Funder scores describe statistical patterns in portfolios — never the truth of any individual claim, and never anyone's intent.
Methodology
Educated Opinions traces the genealogy and accuracy of political claims and tests them, where possible, against nonpartisan evidence. Our audit series rates floor statements chosen at random from a fixed, published pool — so we literally cannot cherry-pick which claims to check. Money context is attached only after a verdict is sealed, never before.
Credibility guardrails
These are the commitments the whole method is built to keep.
The formulas, sampling rules, and thresholds are published — with a permanent, commit-hashed timestamp — before any scores are computed, so the method cannot be quietly tuned after seeing whom it flatters or condemns.
Any politician or funder we score can submit a response, displayed unedited on their profile alongside the score.
A public, always-current accounting of who is getting rated, by party and chamber, so any imbalance in our attention is measurable by anyone — including our critics.
Verdicts and scores carry visible version histories. When we correct something, the change and its reason are public; nothing is silently edited.
Clean records are published as prominently as bad ones. This is a lens, not a hit list.
The rated-claim dataset is downloadable, so any researcher — or opponent — can recompute our numbers and check our work.
Every technical term above is defined in the plain-language glossary, which is pinned by a content fingerprint as the start of our public pre-registration trail.