Texas Promise Tracker

Methodology

This page explains how the Texas Promise Tracker works: where the information comes from, the standard we apply to every official, what each rating means, and how often we review the records. Ratings are our judgments based on cited evidence, not legal findings.

The same standards for every party

The same rules apply to every official, whatever their party. Those rules are enforced in the tracker's code, not improvised case by case.

  • We record a promise only from the official's own words, with a link to where they said it.
  • Every promise needs a source URL. New promises start as Not yet rated (unverified).
  • Any rating other than Not yet rated must cite at least one piece of evidence, with a link, for that promise.
  • A rating is a judgment we make after reading the cited evidence. We say so on the official's page by showing the sources. It is not a court finding, an official determination, or a claim of wrongdoing.
  • Ratings are never overwritten. A new rating adds a row and marks the old one superseded, so the full history stays visible.
  • When the evidence is clear, the rating follows it. We don't split the difference to look balanced.
  • Nothing is guessed. If something can't be verified, it stays Not yet rated or at the last verified step.

What each rating means

Each promise gets one current status. The names below are the labels you will see on the site.

  • Kept — The official did what they said they would do, based on the cited evidence.
  • In progress — Work has started, but the promise is not finished. Filing a bill or holding a hearing is a start, not a result. In progress does not count toward an official's kept rate.
  • Compromised/partial (partial / compromised) — The official got part of what they promised, or the result is a clear compromise short of the original pledge.
  • Blocked by others — The official tried, and someone else stopped it. The cited evidence has to show both the effort and the block.
  • Broken — The official did not do what they said they would do, and the evidence does not show that someone else blocked them.
  • Not yet rated (unverified) — We have not yet judged this promise, or we do not yet have enough cited evidence to rate it. Unverified promises are not treated as kept or broken.

Kept rate = Kept / rated, where rated means Kept, Compromised/partial, Broken, or Blocked by others. Officials need 3 or more rated promises to be ranked. Fewer get a LOW SAMPLE badge and are listed unranked.

A fuller account of promise steps, overdue and stalled flags, campaign-finance loads, foreign-link leads, and flip labels is on the About & methods page.

Sources we use

Every promise, rating, milestone, donor row, foreign-link lead, and vote on this site links to the source it came from. Typical sources include:

  • Promises and ratings: the official's own statements (campaign sites, speeches, interviews, questionnaires), news reports, official records, bill pages, and roll calls, each with a URL.
  • Rosters: clerk.house.gov, senate.gov, capitol.texas.gov, senate.texas.gov, official statewide office sites, and county elected-official directories. Party for legislators comes from Open States and is labeled that way.
  • Campaign money: the Federal Election Commission for federal officials, and the Texas Ethics Commission for statewide officials and legislators. County campaign-finance records, where used, come from the county clerk or elections office, not the TEC. Names and employers are shown as filed.
  • Foreign-link leads: address and employer signals in those filings, a curated list of PACs tied to U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-headquartered companies, and name matches against DOJ FARA registrations. These are leads, not accusations. See 52 U.S.C. 30121.
  • Votes: federal roll calls from clerk.house.gov and senate.gov. Texas Legislature journal votes are not loaded yet, and no votes are inferred.
  • Districts and the map: Texas Legislative Council "Districts by County" reports, and the U.S. Census cartographic boundary file (2023, 1:5M).

How often we review records

We try to keep records from going stale. Three checks work together:

  • Daily checkup. Each day, an automated check can move a promise up one progress step when a linked bill has moved, but only with a dated source. Downgrades to Broken or Blocked by others are never applied automatically; they are flagged for a person to review.
  • Weekday rotation. On weekdays, a person reviews about 25 officials. That pass looks at whether promises, ratings, and sources are still accurate and complete.
  • 45-day staleness rule. Anyone who has not been reviewed in 45 days or more, or who has never been reviewed, is pulled to the front of that weekday queue, oldest first. Each official's page shows Last checked and the date, or Not yet reviewed.

If you spot an error, report a correction with a supporting source. We check those reports by the same rules. This site is informational only and may contain errors.