How the Civic Credit Score Works

Pull up a candidate's character credit score before you vote, and decide for yourself.

You already trust a number you've never seen the formula for. A three-digit FICO score decides whether you get a mortgage, an apartment, a car, and a credit card. Fair Isaac was a private company that appointed itself the arbiter of American creditworthiness, and the country accepted it — not because the company was anointed, but because the rule is published and applied the same way to everyone.

The Civic Credit Score does the same thing for political character. Citizens are the creditors. Conduct is the repayment history. The vote is whether to lend again.

The voter use case: Before you vote, pull up the candidate's character credit score. Look at the band. Look at the factors that drove it. Look at the cited evidence behind each one. Then decide for yourself. That's the entire system.

What it measures

The score grades documented public conduct against a fixed standard derived from the oath of office and the legal-ethics fiduciary tradition. Same rule for every officeholder, regardless of party, era, or popularity. The standard never moves; the evidence does.

How it's built — patterns, not single events

FICO doesn't drop your score because of one late payment. It doesn't spike your score because of one on-time payment. It reads patterns over time. The Civic Credit Score works the same way:

One good vote does not reform a pattern of office-as-enrichment.
One bad statement does not condemn an officeholder who otherwise meets the standard.
Scores update per seat, per election cycle, and whenever new evidence meets the rebuttal standard.

Published weights

FICO publishes that payment history is 35% of the score, utilization is 30%, history length is 15%, new credit is 10%, and credit mix is 10%. The Civic Credit Score publishes its weights too:

Factor	Weight	What it captures
Civic Realism Core (M01–M07)	25%	Substantive output, opponents-as-citizens, honesty, civic duty
Fiduciary Standard (M06, M11)	20%	Financial conduct, oath of office, conflict-of-interest discipline
Power Dynamics (M08, M09, M10)	15%	Use of office power, decorum, treatment of subordinates
Rule of Law (M07, M11)	15%	Constitutional fidelity, January 6 conduct, certification posture
Discourse (M03, M05, M13)	15%	How they speak about opponents, voters, the institutions
Followership Dimension (Four Pillars)	10%	How the citizenry elevated them — the only measure that grades us, not them

Bands are the unit

FICO reports 300–850 but nobody actually thinks in single-point increments. The bands are the unit:

Composite 7.5+ · Tier: Above the Seat's Standard. Record clears the bar the office requires. Rare by design.

Composite 6.0–7.4 · Tier: Above Median, Below the Seat. Civic duty present, compromised by partisan pressure.

Composite 5.0–5.9 · Tier: At Median. Operating at the median is operating below what the office requires.

Composite 4.0–4.9 · Tier: Below Median. Partisan loyalty over civic duty is the dominant pattern.

Composite under 4.0 · Tier: Far Below Median. Documented state-power abuse or sustained office-as-enrichment.

The composite number exists. We report it. But never let "4.4 vs 4.5" pretend to be a precision claim. The band is the unit, the way "good credit" or "fair credit" is the FICO unit.

The open credit score

FICO has one durable weakness: it's a black box. The formula is proprietary; the data sources are opaque; bias is encoded and not auditable. The Civic Credit Score is the opposite by construction:

Every factor weight is public (above).
Every boundary rule is public — the M03 ladder, for example, publishes what separates a 3 from a 2 (does the language place the target inside the set of persons or outside it).
Every piece of evidence is sourced and citable. A hostile reviewer can click through to the roll-call vote, the FD filing, the conviction.
The score counts only conduct-by-choice — never circumstance, never demographics, never anything the officeholder did not choose.

We are the bureau, not the lender

The single most important thing about a credit score: the bureau reports the pattern. The bureau never says "this person will default." That call belongs to the lender, who reads the report and decides whether to extend credit.

Mirror that exactly. The Civic Credit Score never claims a politician "will" betray the oath. We show the record. The citizen casts the ballot. The voter is the lender. The vote is the loan.

The one place we improve on credit

FICO forgives everything eventually. A bankruptcy ages off in 7–10 years; even a foreclosure clears your record over time. The Civic Credit Score follows the same logic for ordinary conduct — recovery is always possible, the climb is just long. But character does not forgive the unforgivable. Conduct that kills or causes the death of people without due process, true tyranny, or genocide carries a terminal classification — DISQUALIFIED — and the score is suspended entirely. There is no average that offsets the catastrophic. A war criminal's collegiality is not graded.

Look up your officeholders now.

Filter by state, office, or party on the main roster. Each politician has a sourceable dossier with their full M01–M14 measure breakdown.

— Shawn Paul Cosner, J.D. · Founder, Civic Realism