How a thing becomes a receipt.
stood.app is a public, non-partisan ledger of every U.S. politician’s record on the questions that matter. We do not characterize. We do not summarize. We collect, source, and date.
What is a receipt
A receipt is the atom of the system. It is one of three things, and only three: a roll-call vote, a public statement, or a formal action — a sponsorship, a signature, an endorsement on the record.
Every receipt is sourced. Every receipt is timestamped. Every receipt is permanent. Once approved, it is pinned to the politician's file forever — no edits, no quiet retractions, no memory-holing.
Sourcing rules
Every receipt cites a primary source. No paraphrases. No “sources close to the senator.” No anonymous quotes. If the source can vanish, we capture it on the way in.
On approval, the original URL is pushed to an archive snapshot and a content hash is written next to it. If the original 404s tomorrow, the snapshot is the receipt. The hash proves it has not been edited.
Voice
Short. Punchy. Never hedging. Editor summaries are one or two sentences, voice-matched, written in the active tense.
We do not predict. We do not estimate how a politician would vote. We do not fact-check the claims inside a statement. We record the position that was taken, and the date it was taken.
Contributor guide
Anyone can submit a receipt. Authentication is required — every submission is bound to an account, and every account is bound to a verified email. There are no anonymous submitters visible to the public, and there are no anonymous submissions to the moderation queue.
Moderators approve. Two volunteer editors who do not share a state or a political affiliation review every submission before it is published. Disagreements escalate. Approved receipts ship; rejected receipts are logged with a reason. The audit trail is permanent.