Empowered Vote · Volunteer Briefing · July 21, 2026
Every number on this page comes from the live database, verified git history, or our product analytics, not from estimates. We build tools for shared facts; our progress report should be one. Eight apps are live or in alpha, three are in active development, and the deep data work is far ahead of what most of us realized.
Since June 7, nearly all effort has gone into the Inform pillar, on purpose. The 2026 midterms are four months out, and the work that moved is exactly what an anonymous voter touches in an election year: House candidate coverage that now spans the whole country (over 1,400 2026 candidates carry researched stances, from the biggest states down to the single-district delegations, with district maps refreshed state by state for the new cycle), audited state budget pipelines that reached all 50 states, campaign-finance records that trace the money behind every federal candidate, city-by-city official seeding, and a fast-growing public-meetings transcript system. The Connect pillar apps are intentionally parked until after this push; that is sequencing, not abandonment.
Open to everyone, no login. Evidence-based, engaging, anti-partisan.
| Feature | Status | Journey | Where it stands | What's next |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Empowered Essentials | Live Alpha | alpha |
ZIP-to-representatives with funding, votes, stances. Smart Banners (v21.0) complete through phase 189: served communities get custom city imagery (CA, MA, UT, TX, OR, NV, ME, DC-Maryland-Virginia), Census population on each locality, and two-way links to its Treasury budget. | 2026 House candidate waves; more served alpha communities. |
| Empowered Compass | Live | alpha |
44 topics, 220 authored stances, spectrum + invert mechanic, side-by-side politician comparison. 1,785 calibration changes tracked. | Quick-compare polish; inferred-stance overlays as research matures. |
| Treasury Tracker | Live | alpha |
The sleeper giant. See the coverage panel below; the audited state-budget pipeline now covers all 50 states and reaches back to FY1976. | v2.17 added Tucson line-item enrichment with a blind source-chain audit; v2.18 just closed, bringing four Pima County municipalities to budget parity (seeded, loaded, enriched, and signed off in a 34-scenario live UAT). Latest: the app adopted the shared @empoweredvote/analytics stack — PostHog product events on real line-item interactions, signed-in identity, and error tracking with sourcemaps. |
| Read & Rank | In Development | build |
Rebuilt this month: mobile-first evaluate/rank surfaces, motion system, race hub with relevance bands, now on real race data from the platform core. Newest: a ballot-first election picker (smart search + county browse) and a redesigned reveal & results — merged spectrum band, numbers-led marks, Essentials-style cards, and a per-topic quote drawer. | Candidate quote sourcing for 2026 races. |
| Fallacy Finders | In Development | build |
No longer a concept: the v1.0 core loop shipped June 18 (assign, watch, spot, supportive retro). v1.1 brings real video via a new sourcing plan. | Public-domain federal clips + On the Record transcripts feed the tagging pipeline. |
| Civic Trivia Championships | Live | alpha |
34 collections (federal, 21 local, 12 state). New brand identity, a Proficiency stat, a re-themed leaderboard, and a 5-question format, with volunteer-contributed features. | Content editor roles; civic-moment event nights. |
Connected accounts, one human one voice. Parked during the election push; resumes after November.
| Feature | Status | Journey | Where it stands | What's next |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Civic Spaces | Live | alpha |
Geo-scoped communities (neighborhood to federal) with friends, posts, role-gated moderation. v3.0 redesign shipped in April. | v4.0 planning, post-election. |
| Empowered Quests | Live | alpha |
Fact-verification quests with consensus scoring; verified facts already feed Essentials. Red gem quests unlock at VR 90+. | v1.6 planning. |
| Focused Communities | Paused | build |
v1.0 shipped April 17: per-topic forums wired to the Compass. Waiting on the post-election Connect pivot. | v1.1: badge ratification and argument mapping. |
| Empowered Listening | Paused | build |
Structured debate infrastructure; 5 of 6 phases done (timers, transcription, audience notes). One security fix landed in June. | Phase 6: voting and badges. Then Common Grounds can build on it. |
| Emparks | Design | design |
Platform-wide annotation system (five mark types). Full design doc; no build yet. | Awaits Connect-pillar capacity. |
| Common Grounds | Design | design |
Adversarial-collaboration mediation. Full design doc; depends on Empowered Listening and Fallacy Finders arbiters. | Builds after its dependencies land. |
The shared spine every app plugs into.
Auth, tiers, XP and gems, politician database, TIGER geofencing, elections. Milestones shipped all summer, including 2026 House candidate coverage waves 1 through 3 plus a nationwide sweep of the small-delegation states (Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, New England, and more), so every state's House races now carry sourced stances. A state-by-state refresh of 2026 district maps (Tennessee, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, and more) continues, and this week three more Arizona municipalities came online (Marana, Sahuarita, and South Tucson) with structural seeds, official headshots, and evidence-only compass stances, while the campaign-finance historical backfill kept extending and nearly doubled its contribution coverage. The stance-research audit stage keeps discovering and quote-checking sources against On the Record transcripts, and candidate profiles gained more real headshots across the country. 6,871 districts mapped, 121,178 legislative votes and 19,622 bills on record.
Speaker-attributed, searchable transcripts of public meetings, synced to the original video. Already live in the pipeline: 89 meetings, 9,917 transcript segments, 573 identified speakers, including LA City Council with 7,200 recorded council votes. Built by volunteer Chris Andrews; it now feeds the platform's meetings system and will feed Fallacy Finders.
The invisible work. This is what "evidence-based" costs, and we paid it.
34,250 stance positions across 3,752 politicians and 44 topics. Every stance carries reasoning and cited sources; 2,722 sources independently verified. 1,468 of the 2026 candidates already have researched stances.
| Coverage area | Politicians | Stances |
|---|---|---|
| US Congress + national | 489 | 7,682 |
| 2026 candidates (no office yet) | ~1,228 | 9,588 |
| California (state + local) | 361 | 4,454 |
| Maryland legislature | 192 | 2,249 |
| Texas (state + local) | 250 | 1,978 |
| Utah (state + city + county) | 179 | 1,358 |
| Massachusetts (state + local) | 187 | 1,137 |
| Oregon (state + local + county) | 157 | 1,097 |
| Virginia (state + local) | 131 | 645 |
| 43 more states | 252 | 2,208 |
Treasury Tracker's database now holds budget data for 2,435 government entities across all 50 states plus DC, spanning fiscal years 1976 to 2026:
The third leg of the transparency model, alongside votes and stances. The platform now holds 6 million individual campaign-finance contributions totaling $4.7 billion, covering 1,577 federal politicians and candidates across 24 election cycles (1980 to 2026). Every record traces to its original FEC filing; a server-side historical backfill and match-review tooling landed this month to extend coverage back two decades. This is the "who funds whom" data behind Essentials, presented without commentary so users draw their own conclusions.
Every state now has at least one researched official, and all 50 congressional delegations are fully covered at the national level. Shading shows the depth of state and local research per state. (The admin console goes a level deeper, county by county; this is the state rollup.)
Hover any state for its exact count. The seeded tier is mostly governors and statewide officers; deep tiers add legislatures, counties, and cities.
Who actually uses what we build — measured, not guessed.
The Compass isn't failing to convert — it's failing to get seen. Of everyone who reached it in the last 90 days, 9 in 10 engaged and more than 4 in 10 completed a full calibration; that is a healthy flow. The catch is the denominator: only 62 people reached it in a quarter. The main site drew 165 unique visitors in the same window, and most never made it to the Compass. The highest-leverage work in front of us isn't rewording the calibration questions — it's getting the tool in front of the voters already in our ecosystem.
The Compass funnel, measured against everyone who landed on it. Bars show the 90-day rate; counts show the last 30 days and the full quarter.
“Loaded the quiz” fires on page load, so read it as “didn't bounce.” The first real signal of intent is completing a calibration — and more than 4 in 10 of everyone who arrives does.
Unique visitors per app across the empowered.vote ecosystem, last 30 days and the full quarter. Bars scale to the 90-day count.
One new Compass visitor roughly every 35 hours. The audience already exists on the platform; the gap is the hand-off into the Compass, not the Compass itself.
How much further we have to go, honestly.
Finish 2026 House candidate waves (wave 3 of ~4 underway), keep seeding served communities, land Read & Rank candidate quotes, get Fallacy Finders v1.1 real clips flowing through On the Record. Success in November looks like: any voter in a served area can look up every name on their ballot and follow the money behind it.
Reactivate the parked pillar: Empowered Listening phase 6, Focused Communities v1.1, Civic Spaces v4.0. This is where the platform stops being a reference tool and becomes a community, and where our sustaining-donor model actually lives.
Designed but not yet built: the Gems stipend economy, Awareness Exchange, Badges, Symposium tournaments, Emparks, Common Grounds, and tools for citizens to run for office on the strength of their solutions. Roughly a third of the founding vision, waiting on the first two pillars to stand under it. We are honest about this distance; it is the point of the whole journey.
A volunteer-built platform, visible in the commit history.
New this week: an interactive Purpose mind map that walks the whole vision, the thesis and the Why, How, Who, and What, with a short explainer on every concept and pillar feature. It is also linked in the site footer.