How Billboard works

Who runs Billboard

Billboard is an independent project and is not affiliated with Congress or any government agency.

Where the data comes from

Billboard is an independent app and is not affiliated with Congress or any government agency. Bill information comes from Congress.gov and GovInfo, roll-call votes from Congress.gov and the U.S. Senate, and In the news picks are chosen with AI from public news headlines.

• Your congressional district: the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder, from the address you enter in the app.
• The state and district outlines on the vote map: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 cartographic boundary files. The Census Bureau does not endorse Billboard.

What the AI does, and what it does not

An AI model writes each bill's plain-language headline, Why it matters and the Bill Breakdown from the official bill text, and assigns its topics and life areas. It also writes the reasons beside In the news picks, and gives each bill the theme scores that the app's Civic Profile uses.

• The app and shared bill pages label this text: “Written with AI from the official text”.
• A bill's status, actions, committees and roll-call votes are official data from Congress. The AI does not write them.
• The model runs on AWS. No personal information is sent to it.
• It can make mistakes. Every summary has a Report a problem link, and the Help page says what happens next.

Staying neutral

Billboard is for every voter, whatever their views.

• Its wording, ordering, defaults and notifications do not take the side of a party, candidate, bill or cause.
• Bill summaries say what a bill does, not whether it is good.
• Facts about bills, votes and members come from official sources such as Congress.gov, GovInfo and the Senate.
• Lists never rank bills by how many votes they have.

Billboard takes no side on any bill. It has no ads, no paid placement, and no sponsored polls, and we do not sell personal information.

How results work

• Results open after you vote Yea, Nay or Abstain, so other people's votes don't sway yours. A bill's results open once it has 5 votes.
• Other people never see how you voted. Results show only combined counts, and a state or district breakdown appears only after enough people there have voted.
• Results are shown only in the app, never on this website.
• Results are not a scientific poll. They count only the people who use Billboard and chose to vote.

Our data fetcher

Billboard's servers read public bill, vote and member data from Congress.gov, GovInfo and the U.S. Senate. Their requests name BillBoardFetcher in the User-Agent header. If they cause a problem for your site, email contact@billboard-project.com.

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