Intelligence you can check, not intelligence you have to trust.
Every fact is checked against the source that produced it. Every judgment carries its confidence. A named analyst answers for both. This page describes how that works, because a standard nobody can inspect is a slogan.
What verified actually means.
A verified status means the state's own official record was read for that bill on the date shown, and the status matches it. Statuses that have not yet been verified come from a data vendor, and they are checked before they appear in any report.
The discipline is deliberately strict about the calls that matter. A bill is not called enacted until a governor's signature is confirmed. Passage of both chambers is not enactment; a bill sitting on the governor's desk remains active until it is signed. A bill is not called dead until it is genuinely terminal. Where the record is ambiguous, the ambiguity is flagged rather than resolved by guessing.
Enacted bills carry the signing date and the official citation once it has been confirmed against the state's record. Where the signature is confirmed and the citation is not yet, the record says citation pending rather than leaving a blank or inventing one.
Knowing which endings are real is the same problem as knowing which are not.
Most tracking systems report a bill as active long after it has died, or as dead when it can still return. Both errors come from reading language instead of procedure. This is what the alternative looks like in practice.
Virginia sits on both sides of the line.
The system recognizes twenty state-specific procedural death patterns. Illinois Rule 2-10. Hawaii's deferral of a measure. Virginia's passed by indefinitely. Each one is an ending that a generic tracker reads as silence, so the bill stays listed as active for months after it is finished.
The same discipline runs in the opposite direction. In states that carry bills between years, language that signals death elsewhere does not. Virginia's left in committee is deliberately excluded from the detector, because in Virginia the bill returns.
So Virginia contributes both a real death phrase and a deliberately refused one. Passed by indefinitely is an ending and is detected. Left in committee, in the same state, is not. The difference is not the wording. It is what the state does next.
Confidence is stated, and it is separate from the number.
A score and how sure we are of it are two different things, and collapsing them is how forecasts become unfalsifiable. Every forward read carries its confidence independently, so a high score built on a pattern reads differently from a lower one built on a sponsor stating an intention.
Hard means the read rests on confirmed reporting: a sponsor named, a bill drafted, a commitment made. Likely means strong signals short of confirmation. Projected means the read is drawn from history and pattern with no direct reporting yet, and should be treated as directional.
Confidence is a living assessment. A read escalates as intelligence firms up and lowers if the signal does not materialize. Most states sit at projected until the field network develops something specific, and saying so is the point.
Four tiers, and what each one licenses.
Where the work maps actors and the relationships between them, every line on the map is a claim, and every claim carries a tier. The tier governs what can responsibly be done with it, and it travels with the claim into any export.
A registrar-level fact where the action is its own source. A filing exists, a registration was made, a contribution was recorded. Nothing to interpret.
Cite it directlyA citable public artifact establishes it directly: a filing, a roster, a transcript, an attributable statement.
Cite it directlyMultiple sources support it, but none states it outright. A working conclusion drawn from evidence.
Describe as an assessmentA pattern suggests it and it is not established. Shown with its reasoning.
A line of inquiry, never a claimNo black box.
Bills are scored for tactical priority, which is a different question from whether they will pass. A bill with a small chance of passage that would harm your business matters more than a likely one you are neutral on. The scoring answers where to spend attention, not what will become law.
Three components combine into one priority. Momentum is pure observation about where a bill sits in the process and how recently it moved, and it is identical for every client tracking that bill. Salience measures how closely the bill matches your specific exposure, so the same bill carries different salience for different clients. Impact is signed, negative through positive, and captures what happens to you if it passes.
Salience is weighted more heavily than momentum, deliberately. A bill you care about should rise above a fast-moving bill you do not. Impact is multiplicative, so a bill with no consequence for you does not crowd your dashboard however fast it is moving.
Every component stays visible. If you disagree with a priority, you can see which input is driving the disagreement rather than arguing with a single number. The full formula, with its exact weights, is published to clients inside the platform.
Analyst judgment overrides the model. Where an analyst assesses a bill's impact directly, that judgment is preserved through every recomputation, and the record labels which layer produced the number.
The same words mean the same things everywhere.
These definitions are used identically across every surface a client sees, so a term never quietly shifts meaning between a report and a screen.
What the work does not claim.
Where we do not know, the product says so rather than manufacturing certainty. Calibrated uncertainty is a feature, not a hedge, and the limits are stated because a system that claims everything is the one you cannot rely on.
Check the work.
If something here looks wrong, say so. A disputed status is a useful signal and checking it costs little. Request a briefing and Nexus will show you what this looks like against your own landscape.