How we source and verify what's on this site

Every fact follows the same path

An AI research agent reads the primary source wherever it can be reached: the statute, the regulation, the agency rule, or the published decision, and records the citation, the effective date, the link, and the operative language in this site's internal source register. Where an official source cannot be reached directly, the record says so rather than hiding it, and the fact stays unpublished.

Then a second AI agent, from a different model family, is handed the question and the state, and nothing else. Not the first answer, not the first agent's notes. It goes to the primary source and derives the fact again. The two derivations are compared. If they agree, the fact publishes. If they disagree, it does not, and it goes to a third pass with both readings on the table; anything still unresolved stays "Research pending" and is logged as unresolved. Before a fact renders, its citation is checked once more against the text the government is publishing today, because statutes and agency rules move underneath a citation that used to be right.

Matt Spencer, the site operator, reviews a sample of verified facts against their sources, and reviews every correction.

A verified fact renders with the date it was checked and a link to what it was checked against. Until it clears, it reads "Research pending," which means we have not published an answer yet, not that the answer is no, and the page it sits on is marked noindex so a search engine is not invited to a page that has nothing verified on it yet.

Read the full editorial policy for the complete rules, including how independence is protected when the business that runs the verification also sells advertising, what happens when the underlying law changes, and how facts get demoted back to "Research pending" if they age past their recheck date.

Statute text, and which office does which job

Two further kinds of content follow fixed rules of their own, set by ruling R39 in this site's internal record.

Statute text. Some facts can appear as the statute's own words rather than as an answer. Two readers, each working separately from the full official text of a state's statute as fetched fresh from the state's own publisher, choose every passage that bears on a question. Every passage either of them chooses is shown word for word, with its citation, a link to the official text and the date it was fetched, under a neutral heading and its own label, "Statute text", which is a different label from the verified one described above. The site checks mechanically that every word shown is in the official text, writes no summary or interpretation beside those passages, and never uses this route to say a state has no law on something. A fact that has already cleared the two-derivation process keeps that label and never moves to this route. 3 facts currently appear this way.

Government offices. A state's page can also name which government office does which job, such as which office titles vehicles or takes complaints, and link to that office's own pages. Each line uses one of a few fixed sentence forms, rests on a saved copy of the office's own website on a government address (or a listed exception with a stated reason), and shows the date it was checked. A second reader confirms each sentence against that saved copy, and the site will not publish a line whose check is more than 92 days old. These lines never say what the law requires, what anything costs, what deadlines apply, or whether a program applies to you, and an office missing from the list is not a statement that no such office exists. Some offices' websites turn away automated visitors. This site does not try to get past those checks by automated means. A page from such a site is saved by hand in an ordinary web browser by this site's editor, then run through the same tool and checks. An office whose pages have not been saved that way is left out.

Where things actually stand

These three numbers are computed from this site's own data files at build time; they update automatically as verification lands, they are not a hand-typed status line someone forgot to update.

Source records

Every source this site draws a fact from is registered before its first use: what it is, what we take from it, the license or legal basis for using it, and a running change log against it. That register is an internal document, not a page on this site; it exists so a sponsor doing diligence, a future editor, an attorney reading us skeptically, or you can audit exactly where a fact came from. It also records both verification passes for every published fact and where they disagreed. If you want to know the source behind a specific claim, ask us and we will tell you.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or misattributed, we want to know before a reader relies on it. Read the corrections and removal policy for how to report it and what happens next.