We're just trying to show you the data.

That's it. That's the whole pitch.

Govona started because finding out what your representatives actually do — how they vote, who funds them, what they say behind closed doors vs. on camera — should not require a journalism degree. We pull from public records (Congress.gov, FEC filings, and especially GovTrack's open methodology) and put the raw numbers in front of you.

You make your own decisions. We don't tell you who to vote for. We don't push a party. We don't take ad money from campaigns or PACs.

What we are

Grassroots. Built by a small independent team. No corporate sponsors, no campaign clients, no political consulting on the side.

Non-partisan, by design. We rate Democrats and Republicans by the same yardstick — their votes. If a senator votes one way and tells their voters another, the data shows it. No spin.

Transparent. Every score links back to a public source. Our compatibility math is open: weighted Euclidean distance between your answers and theirs — 1 − √(Σ w·(you − them)²) / √(Σ w·4) — where w is how much you said each issue matters. No black box.

How we score people

Every officeholder gets an ideology score derived from GovTrack's published methodology. Here's the short version of how it works:

• Cosponsorship, not voting. GovTrack's ideology analysis assigns a left–right score to each Member of Congress based on their pattern of cosponsorship — comparing which bills they co-sign alongside other members.
• Similarity = proximity. Members who cosponsor similar sets of bills get scores close together; those who sponsor different sets of bills end up far apart on the axis.
• Statistical technique: Principal Components Analysis. Also known as dimensionality reduction — a standard technique that reveals underlying patterns in large data matrices.
• Rolling window. GovTrack includes (co)sponsorship from the current and previous two Congresses — between four and six years of data — so scores evolve slowly and reflect sustained behavior.
• Known caveats (their words, not ours).GovTrack notes the score might measure partisan-ness more than pure left-right, and that cosponsorship is a low-risk action that doesn't always predict how a legislator votes when forced to commit. We surface these limits on every score.

Your compatibility percentage = how close your stated positions sit to each rep's, across the 10 issues. Every issue is weighted by how important you said it is, then we measure the Euclidean distance between the two answer-vectors — meaning one large disagreement hurts the score more than several small ones (which matches how real disagreement actually feels). Formula: 1 − √(Σ w·(you − them)²) / √(Σ w·4), rendered as 0–100%. Higher = closer match. No black box — the math runs in your browser, against your own answers.

What we are not

We are not a 501(c)(4) “dark money” group. We are not a Super PAC. We are not affiliated with any candidate, party, campaign, or political consulting firm. We do not coordinate with campaigns. We do not endorse.

If you find something on Govona that looks biased, tell us. Bias correction is the entire job.

Where the data comes from

Officeholders' scores and voting records:

• GovTrack.us — ideology scores (cosponsorship-based PCA), bill tracking, voting records. Primary source.
• Congress.gov — official roll-call records, bill text, sponsorship.
• FEC.gov — campaign finance filings.

For non-officeholders (CEOs, podcasters, celebrities), no academic ideology score exists. We label these as “Public-Statement Estimate” and show the basis (endorsements, donations, on-record statements) so you can judge for yourself.

How we make money

Right now: we don't. Long-term: paid premium features (deeper analytics, alert customization), and grants from non-partisan civic-tech foundations. Never ads from campaigns. Check out our Termsfor more info on what we do and don't do with your data .

Get involved

Spot a wrong score? Want to volunteer? Have data we should be pulling in? Email hello@govona.org.