Questions & answers

Civvie is a free, nonpartisan tool that shows how your members of Congress voted on the issues you care about. You ask a question in plain language, give your ZIP code, and get an answer backed by official records, with a link to the source behind every claim.

Yes. There is no charge, no account, and nothing to sign up for.

No. Civvie does not editorialize, rank, or score representatives, and it uses no party color-coding. It reports what the record shows and links to the source. The goal is to inform your judgment, not replace it.

No, and it won't try. Civvie gives you the record and the context behind it. What you do with that is yours, and it happens at the ballot box.

Everything comes from official sources: Congress.gov and GovInfo for bills and votes, the Federal Register for executive actions, the Congressional Budget Office for what a bill costs, and the Joint Committee on Taxation for who pays more or less in taxes. Every claim links back to its source.

Civvie uses AI for two narrow jobs: turning dense official documents into plain language ahead of time, and writing a short summary that ties the results to your question. It cannot invent a vote, a sponsor, a date, or a number, and every vote claim it writes is automatically checked against the official record. If anything is uncertain, Civvie shows you rather than hiding it. How Civvie works walks through every step.

For explaining a famous bill, a chatbot does fine. But its answer comes from memory or a quick web search, and both are secondhand. Memory can invent votes that never happened. Search mostly returns news coverage — which picks the bills worth a story, frames them for an audience, and skips the unglamorous votes that make up most of your reps' actual record. Civvie works from the record itself: positions are computed from official roll-call data, bills are included by one fixed rule instead of newsworthiness, every vote claim is checked against the record after it's written, and every claim links to its source so you can see for yourself. A chatbot can personalize too — but only by keeping a profile of you across conversations. Civvie personalizes without remembering you: your ZIP (or full address, only if your ZIP crosses district lines) is used once to find your three seats and never stored. And when the record has nothing, Civvie says so plainly instead of dressing up a near-miss as an answer.

One rule, the same for every topic: if your representative cast a recorded floor vote on a bill, it is included. Civvie does not hand-pick bills by what it thinks is important. Bills no one in your delegation voted on, and procedural housekeeping resolutions with no legal effect, are left out.

Civvie covers the 118th and 119th Congresses (January 2023 to today). Official vote records reach further back, and we plan to extend coverage over time — we started with the two most recent Congresses so every bill gets the same complete treatment. A few older landmark laws, like the Inflation Reduction Act, are included too.

Federal only: your two US senators and your one US House representative. Civvie does not currently cover state legislatures, governors, or local officials.

No account, no email, no login. Your ZIP is used once, to find which district and senators represent you, and is not stored. If your ZIP crosses district lines, Civvie asks for your full street address to pinpoint it, and that isn't stored either. Civvie keeps no profile of you. Privacy has the full detail.

Those are reference libraries: powerful, but they expect you to know what you're looking for. Civvie starts from a plain-language question and your ZIP, translates the legislative detail into something readable, and shows the tradeoffs inside each bill instead of just a yes or no.