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Leader Lookup places politicians on the same questions you answer yourself. That is only worth anything if you can check where each answer came from — so every position we publish carries its source, and where we cannot support an answer we show nothing rather than a guess.
Each question is filled by the most authoritative layer that has something to say. A lower layer never overrides a higher one: an AI-read answer is only ever used where the layers above it are silent. Not every layer is populated yet — the counts below are live, and a layer showing no data is one we have not yet built out.
It searches the open web for the person, fetches the pages it finds, and asks a language model to match what those pages say against each question. It is not asked what it knows about anyone — only what a retrieved page says. Where the general searches miss a topic, it searches again for that topic by name.
A model reading sources under time pressure makes predictable mistakes, so an answer has to survive every one of these before it is published:
What survives is published with its quote and link. What does not goes to a review queue for a person to decide on — 1,123 items are waiting there now. Between a third and a half of what the model proposes is stopped by these checks, which is the point of having them: the ones that fail are not near-misses, they are answers whose evidence does not say what the answer claims.
A member’s own issues page is not the same kind of evidence as a blog post, so we record which we used and prefer the closer one. Reporting is admitted — a member’s own site covers only part of the question set, and journalism is often the only record of a position — but it ranks below their own words, and an unfamiliar site ranks below that. Nothing is excluded for being partisan; it is ranked, and the source is always shown so you can judge it yourself.
Most questions, for most people, have no answer here. That is the honest state of the record rather than an oversight, and we would rather show a gap than fill it with something we cannot stand behind.
If something here is wrong, it is worth telling us — a bad answer is a worse problem for us than a missing one. Every position shows its source so you can check it against the original. Report a correction · Photo credits