# Evidentiary Standard v1.1 — Changelog
**Issued 2026-08-22. `EVIDENTIARY_STANDARD_v1.md` (v1.0, frozen 2026-08-21) is NOT edited by this document and remains the text against which the V2 inter-coder replication (α = 0.91) was run.** v1.1 = v1.0 plus the itemized amendments below. Every amendment states what prompted it, so the reason survives with the rule.

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## A. Sources

**A3 clarification — a partisan filing is two different facts.**
The *existence* of a filing, complaint, or lawsuit brought by a partisan actor is a **Tier 1 fact** (it is on a docket or in an agency record). The *claims inside it* remain **Tier 4** and are never recorded as established. Record the filing as a filing; record its allegations as allegations; record its outcome when there is one.
*Prompted by:* V3 stress test, gap 2 — partisan filings sitting inside official records.

**A4 — NEW. An instruction is a source, and it can be wrong.**
A brief, task description, or operator instruction that asserts a fact is itself a claim requiring verification. A researcher who is told "confirm X about person Y" must verify that X belongs to Y before confirming anything, and must report a mismatch rather than resolving it in favour of the instruction.
*Prompted by:* the 2026-08-22 docket pass, where the operator's own brief wrongly assigned Laurie Buckhout's (NC-01) Georgia DUI to Jennifer Balkcom (NC-11) on a surname collision. The index was correct; the instruction was not; the researcher caught it. Recorded, not erased.

**A5 — NEW. Trace a partisan hit to its origin before discarding it.**
A partisan outlet may be *republishing* admissible journalism. Rejecting the partisan copy is correct; stopping there is not. Where a partisan source carries a specific factual sentence, search that sentence for its original publication before recording a rejection — the underlying reporting may be fully admissible.
*Prompted by:* Mendoza (AZ-06). A statement of her age was first offered from The Democratic Strategist and rejected as partisan-origin. The identical sentence turned out to originate in **Roll Call** — non-partisan Capitol Hill journalism — and, once admitted, it resolved her Election-Day age outright. The rejection was right about the source presented and wrong as a stopping point.

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## B. Negatives and identity

**B4 — NEW. Identity-unverified positive hits are leads, never entries.**
A record hit on a candidate's name may be recorded as an entry only when the identity is **keyed** — by date of birth, a unique government identifier, or an equivalent anchor that cannot be shared with another person of the same name. District plus common name is **not** a key. Where no key exists, the correct entry is "identity-unverified" together with whatever anchors *are* established, and no record search is run at all.
*Prompted by:* V3 stress test, gap 1; applied 2026-08-22 to Thomas Smith (MI-08), where the FEC carries no DOB field for any candidate and no public source states one. Note the corollary: **the strength of an anchor does not transfer.** A Tier 1 district match does not make the person keyed.

**B5 — NEW. Bounded negatives must name the wall, not just the absence.**
Where a record could not be reached because a portal refused the request, required an account, or sits behind a paywall, the bounded negative must say so specifically. "Not located" and "could not be reached" are different findings and are recorded differently. **No paywall or access control is ever circumvented**, and an attempt that would require circumvention is reported as a bound, not pursued.
*Prompted by:* the Buckhout Georgia docket (Richmond County portal 403; PeachCourt account-gated; no free statewide Georgia criminal index) — a flag that stays open and is *described* as open rather than quietly dropped.

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## C. Faith

**C4 clarification — personal faith language only; slogans and values words do not count.**
A faith cell is filled only from the subject's own documented statement about their own belief or practice, or from documented membership. The following are **not** faith statements, whatever they suggest: campaign slogans invoking "faith, family and freedom"; values language; documented charitable or mission-work activity; an infobox on a third-party wiki; attendance at an event; another person's characterization of the subject's beliefs.
*Prompted by:* V2, where faith was the weakest field (α = 0.24, 3 of 4 disagreements) and the C4 slogan ambiguity surfaced.

**C5 — NEW. Topic is not profession.**
That a subject discussed a religion — even at length, even in material they promoted themselves — establishes the topic, not their belief. A third party's description of the subject's conversion is that third party's characterization, not the subject's statement, and does not fill the cell.
*Prompted by:* the O'Donnell (NV-03) faith lead. An interview titled "Halo and The Catholic Church," which O'Donnell promoted from his own verified account, carries a publisher's chapter label reading "Marty talks about his recent conversion to The Catholic Church." That label is the publisher's, not his. The cell stays blank pending a transcript of what he himself says.

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## D. Legal

**D5 — NEW. Disposition vocabulary is recorded in the court's own words and never upgraded.**
Specifically: **nolle prosequi** is a dismissal on the prosecution's motion. It is not an acquittal, not an expungement, and not a dismissal on the merits, and must not be described as any of them. **Dismissal for want of prosecution** means the plaintiff failed to advance the case, not that the claim was adjudicated against them. A **settlement** is not an admission of liability. A **reduced** charge means the conviction is the reduced offence — a DUI reduced to reckless driving is a reckless-driving conviction, and the reduction travels with the charge wherever the charge is stated. Where a court portal reports an amount owed, that is not evidence of the amount assessed.
*Prompted by:* the 2026-08-22 docket pass — Leonard (OH-15, nolle prosequi on the obstruction count), Tijerina (TX-28, settlement and dismissal for want of prosecution), Buckhout (NC-01, reduced charge).

**D6 — NEW. Capacity separates entries.**
Where a subject is party to a matter in more than one capacity, each is a separate entry: personal capacity, official capacity, and business capacity are never merged into one line. A sum sought in a pleading is never restated as a judgment amount.
*Prompted by:* Tijerina (TX-28), where a single docket search returned one personal-capacity motor-vehicle suit and two official-capacity suits against the county commissioners court — three different facts that a single "civil suit" cell would have flattened into one misleading one.

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## G. Age

**G1 stands unamended: ages are never inferred.** Career length, service dates, graduation or class years, licensure or bar-admission dates, and family composition are not statements of age and are never converted into one. In the 2026-08-22 pass this rule left six candidates blank whose ages were strongly implied — Desmond (Navy 1974-79, 33 years at Delta), Ollivant (West Point, NSC tenure), Regnitz, Berman (23 years in healthcare), Flores (bar admission), Tijerina — and those blanks are correct.

**G2 — NEW. Notation: "~N" means stated-age-derived and carries ±1.**
An integer age is recorded only from a full date of birth. Where the source states an age at a dated moment but no month and day, the Election-Day value is uncertain by one year and is recorded as **"~N"**, with the underlying stated age and its date preserved in the Source Log. Where two stated ages bracket the birthday, the value may be pinned to an integer and the bracketing shown.
*Prompted by:* 17 of 23 age blanks closed on 2026-08-22, of which only one (Balkcom, from the NC public voter file's birth-year field) rested on a government record.

**G3 — NEW. A stated DOB in an unexpected register is a statement, not an inference — but source domain and identity-keying still apply, and a standing project decision outranks both.**
Where a database outside the usual ladder prints a date of birth, that is an affirmative statement and G1 does not bar it. It must still clear the tier ladder and B4 identity-keying, and where the project has made an explicit prior decision not to use a subject's particular life domain as evidence, that decision holds until the operator revisits it.
*Prompted by:* Tijerina (TX-28), whose date of birth is printed in minor-league baseball registers. The index had explicitly refused to use his baseball career, and the identity link from player record to candidate rested on matching organisation, region and middle initial rather than on a key (B4).

**RESOLVED 2026-08-22 by operator ruling: if we do not know the age, the cell is BLANK.** The DOB was not entered and the cell stands empty. Accepting it would have produced the only exact date of birth in the whole pass; that was not treated as a reason to accept it. The general rule this settles: **where a stated DOB clears G1 but fails either the source-domain test or the identity-keying test, the cell is blank — "almost keyed" is not keyed, and the value of a datum is never an argument for its admissibility.** The properly-sourced route (the Webb County government biography, robots-blocked to automated fetch) remains open to a manual check.

**G4 — NEW. What makes an age reliable. An age is entered, or it is blank; there is no third state.**
*Operator ruling, 2026-08-22: "If we can't find an age, or a reliable age, we don't add it."*

An age is entered when a source **states** it and that source is:
1. **Identified** — you can name the outlet, the byline where there is one, and the date. A reprint whose originating outlet cannot be established is not identified.
2. **Editorial** — the outlet asserts the age in its own voice. It **does not have to be a government record**; a named newspaper, broadcaster or newsroom writing "Smith, 52, of Toledo" is reliable.
3. **Not partisan-origin** — campaign sites, party and PAC material, and opposition sites may locate an age but never establish one.

Corroboration is preferred and recorded, but is **not** required. Where an entry rests on a single reporting act it is marked single-source rather than presented as confirmed.

**What does NOT count as a second source:**
- **Syndication.** A network reprint of the same article is the same article. (Coleman's age appears on AOL and MSN; both are Gannett republications of one Akron Beacon Journal piece.)
- **The same reporter.** (Flint's age appears in three Montana Free Press articles, all by the same byline — one reporting act, repeated.)
- **An outlet quoting another outlet.**
- **People-search data brokers**, which are neither editorial nor identity-keyed.

**Self-reported ages are not sufficient on their own.** A candidate-questionnaire age with no editorial confirmation anywhere fails this rule and the cell is blank. This is a deliberate departure from the faith rule (C4), where the subject's own statement *is* the standard — faith is internal and only the subject can attest it, whereas age is externally verifiable and here nobody verified it.
*Prompted by:* Powell (NE-02), whose only available age was a self-reported voter-guide field. The decisive fact was that the newsroom which collected the questionnaire declined to print the number in either of its own subsequent articles about her. **A number the collecting newsroom would not print is not a number this index prints.** Entry removed; reversible if an outlet states it in its own voice.

**G5 — NEW. The asterisk: mark a hair-split, don't argue it.**
*Operator instruction, 2026-08-22: where the value turns on a one-year boundary we cannot settle, flag it and come back later.*

Notation, in full:

| Form | Meaning |
|---|---|
| `52` | Election-Day age is **certain** — an exact sourced DOB, **or** dated statements that triangulate to one value |
| `~52` | derived from a stated age with no month or day; carries ±1 at Election Day (G2) |
| `~52*` | that ±1 is a **near coin flip** (roughly 45–55%). Splitting hairs; deferred and revisitable |
| *(blank)* | not located, or not reliable under G4. Never "assumed" |

An asterisk is resolved by a date of birth, a birthday mention, or **any age statement dated after Election Day**.

**Triangulation can produce a certain age without a date of birth.** Where three or more dated statements exist, intersect their birth windows; if the resulting window falls entirely on one side of Election Day, the age is certain even though the DOB remains unknown, and the tilde comes off.
*Prompted by:* Mendoza (AZ-06). Three non-partisan statements — 48 on 2025-02-12, 49 on 2025-10-08, 49 on 2026-06-22 — intersect to a birth window of 23 June to 8 October 1976, so her 50th birthday necessarily precedes Election Day. She is **50**, certainly, and nobody has ever published her date of birth.

**A window can be narrowed by a source that cannot corroborate.** Two dated statements by the same reporter remain **one reporting act** and do not lift an entry out of single-source — but two different *dates* still constrain the birthday. Narrowing a window and corroborating a fact are different operations, and the same source may perform the first without performing the second.
*Prompted by:* Flint (MT-01), where a second Montana Free Press piece by the same byline moved the likelier value from 47 to 46 without making the entry two-source.

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## I. Process

**I4 — NEW. Errors are recorded where they happened, not where they were noticed.**
An error in an instruction is logged against the instruction; an error in an entry is logged against the entry; an error in a published report is logged in that report's own erratum. Corrections are appended, never applied silently in place.

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*v1.1 issued 2026-08-22. v1.0 remains frozen and is the text the α = 0.91 replication was run against; any future replication must state which version it was coded under. Changes → v1.2 with a changelog.*