Our Editorial Standard

How We Decide What's a Fact

Every Claim Your Voter Power Fact Brief follows one test, applied the same way every time. Here it is in ninety seconds — and then in as much depth as you care to read.

A Fact Brief reports only what is measurable and checkable — a percentage, a dollar figure, what a statute actually says, what a government audit actually found. Every such claim is traced to an authoritative, ideally primary source, and every source link is opened and read before it ships. We never confirm a number from memory, and we never cite a figure we have not personally read in the source it points to.

The one test: not "is it balanced?" — balance can launder a talking point. The only question we ask of any sentence is: can a normal person check it against the source, and does the source say exactly that? If the answer is no, it doesn't go in.

What counts as a fact

Facts, never assertions

The line we hold is between things that can be measured and things that cannot. A number in a government report can be checked. A claim about someone's motive, intent, or priorities cannot — and attributing it to a source does not change that. So the second kind never appears in a brief, even when a credible source says it, and even when leaving it out makes a brief look one-sided. Chasing "balance" by adding an unverifiable claim to offset another one is exactly how talking points get laundered into fact sheets. We don't do it.

1
Facts only, never assertions. Percentages, dollars, what a law says. Motive, intent, and prediction are political claims — out, even when sourced.
2
Verifiable and sourced. Every claim traces to an authoritative, ideally primary source. Each link is opened and confirmed to state the cited number.
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Up to date. We prefer the newest data and state the data year plainly, so an old figure is never dressed up as a current one.
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Plain language. Written so a normal, non-technical reader understands — and so terms that misinformation blurs together are pulled apart and defined.
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Aimed at real confusion. Each fact answers a specific misleading claim people actually encounter, with the checkable number that cuts through it.
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Chosen for reliability, not viewpoint. A source's political label is irrelevant. We use government data, nonpartisan researchers, and think tanks across the spectrum — for their facts, never their framing.
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Honest about weak spots. If a source hedges, we carry the hedge into the brief. Tidying a caveat away would make a number look firmer than its own author claims.

The trap we watch for

A real number, measured the wrong way

Most errors we catch are not false numbers. They are real numbers compared to the wrong thing — a legal cap read as an average, one state's audit presented as a national finding, a name on a voter roll counted as a vote. These slip past casual reading, so we check every figure against a fixed list of mismatches before it ships. Here are two examples.

Roll entries vs. ballots cast

A dead person's name left on a voter list is not a vote. One state audit found over 1,400 dead registrations — and 2 ballots. We state both numbers. Citing either one alone misleads, in opposite directions.

Arrested vs. detained

"About 70% had criminal charges" describes people arrested. Of people actually held in detention, about 70.8% had no conviction. Different groups, different points in time. A brief must say which one a figure counts.

Other pairs on the list: gross debt vs. debt held by the public; a category's share of spending vs. its dollar amount; an actual result vs. a projection; one year vs. a ten-year total; a legal maximum vs. a measured average; a peak vs. the current level; a single-jurisdiction finding vs. a national claim.

How each brief is built

The process, start to finish

The same eight steps produce every brief — so you can trust what's on the page, and check it yourself.

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Identify an issue voters actually care about.
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Research it independently, using primary documents and the most up-to-date data.
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Use more than one AI tool to help search and organize — while a human makes every judgment.
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Cross-check for accuracy and fairness.
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Write it plainly and concisely.
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Verify that every factual claim is backed by a directly relevant, credible source.
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Present the facts on contested points; note where credible sources disagree.
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Use sources across the political spectrum, chosen for reliability — not for the conclusions they reach.

Check us yourself

The whole point of a Fact Brief is that you don't have to take our word for it. Every brief is built to be audited by a reader:

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Every figure carries a bracketed number — [3] — pointing to a numbered source on the last page.
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Every source is a live link to the original document. Open it and read the number for yourself.
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The Sources page shows a "verified" date — the day we last opened every link and confirmed it still says what we cite. Different briefs carry different dates, because we re-check them on different schedules.
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If you ever find a claim that doesn't match its source, tell us. Correcting it is the job.

For newsletters, partners, and educators

Fact Briefs are free to print, copy, host, and distribute — unaltered, with attribution (CC BY-ND 4.0). Quote any figure with a citation. The "unaltered" clause is the only real condition: it keeps a changed number from circulating under our name. If you want to translate a brief or adapt it, just ask.

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Prepared for educational purposes from publicly available sources believed reliable at the time of publication. A www.ClaimYourVoterPower.org resource. This page describes the editorial standard behind every Fact Brief. · ClaimYourVoterPower.org · 7/11/26