The character credit score
Pull up a politician's record the way you would pull a credit report, and decide for yourself. The number runs on the same 300 to 850 scale a lender would recognize, for the same reason a lender uses it: it turns a long history of behavior into one honest figure you can read at a glance, with every entry sourced underneath it.
Why a credit score
A credit score is not a verdict on a person's worth. It is a record of whether they kept their commitments, built from documented history, applied to everyone by the same rule. That is exactly what this is. Citizens are the creditors. Conduct in office is the repayment history. The vote is the decision whether to lend again. The score only puts the history in front of you before you decide.
And it is built the way credit is built, from patterns rather than single events. One missed payment does not define a credit file, and one good vote does not reform a pattern of office used for self, family, or faction. A score measures how a person has behaved over the length of a career, weighted toward what the office most requires. The pattern is the point.
We are the bureau, not the lender
This is the line that matters most, and it is the whole civic purpose of the project. A credit bureau does not decide who gets the loan. It reports the pattern, honestly and in the open, and the lender decides. Here the citizen is the lender. This score reports the record; the ballot is yours. It never tells you how to vote, never endorses, never predicts. It hands you the same documented history for every name on the ballot and gets out of the way.
The bureau reports the pattern. The citizen casts the ballot. The voter is the lender.
The bands are the unit
Read the band, not the decimal. A single point of credit score is noise; the band is the signal, the way “good credit” or “fair credit” is the unit people actually use. Six bands span the scale, each tied to one question: did the record clear the bar the office requires, or fall short of it, and by how much.
| Band | Credit range | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Exemplary | 800–850 | Clears the seat's standard with documented, sustained civic conduct. Rare by design. |
| Strong | 740–799 | Above the bar. Civic duty is the governing habit of the record. |
| Sound | 670–739 | Clears the bar, with weaker stretches the record carries honestly. |
| Adequate | 580–669 | At or near the median of the political class, which the standard treats as below the office, not at it. |
| Unfit | 500–579 | Below the median. Partisan or personal interest is the throughline of the conduct. |
| Failing | 300–499 | Documented abuse of power or sustained office-as-enrichment. The record does not clear the oath. |
A second number sits beside the band: supported or not supported. It clears only when the credit reaches 700 and no capping conduct flag stands against the record. It is the one place the project states a conclusion, and it is held to a deliberately high line, because the question it answers is not “is this person average” but “does this record meet the trust of the seat.”
The open score
A real credit score has one durable weakness: it is a black box. The bureau will not show you the arithmetic, and you cannot challenge a number you cannot see. This score is the opposite by design. The weights are published before anyone is graded. Every input is a documented act with a primary source attached, and every measure shows the rule that separates one score from the next, so a hostile reviewer can run the library and check the work. The standard never moves; only the evidence does. That openness is the one place this improves on the thing it borrows from.
What the score does not do
It does not grade policy, party, or ideology, in any direction. It does not predict how a person will vote next week, any more than a credit file predicts a default. And it does not average away the unforgivable. Conduct that kills people without due process, true tyranny, the theft of an election, is not a low score to be offset by good conduct elsewhere; it suspends the number entirely. Character does not forgive the unforgivable, and an average that pretends otherwise would be lying to you.