How UnImpact works

Last updated July 22, 2026

UnImpact grades decisions, never persons. For a given decision, a bill, an ordinance, a ruling, an order, a rule, it asks a single question: how close are the people who made it to the people it lands on? The answer is a dignity reading: Honored, Strained, or Denied, with the concrete steps that would raise it.

What the dignity reading measures, and what it doesn’t

A dignity reading weighs whether a decision is worthy of honor and respect, in how it was made and in what it does to the people it names. It does not grade whether the decision is correct, wise, or good policy. Two people who disagree completely about an outcome can agree that a decision was made at a great remove from the people who live with it. That distance is what UnImpact reads. Denied is a statement about process and proximity, not a moral judgment of anyone’s character.

How a dignity reading is computed

Every dignity reading is a function of two things, each built from the public record:

• Closeness, how near the deciders are to the affected, across dimensions like physical proximity, age, class, identity, and worldview. Distance is read from enforcement geography (where a decision was made versus where it lands), not assumed.
• Depth of engagement, whether the deciders share the consequence, engaged the people affected, and understood what they were deciding.

Closeness runs across, depth runs up; a decision’s position on that plane is its dignity. The engine ships a basis with every reading, the specific reasons behind the score, and, in its stricter setting, every non-zero score must carry a source to the record or it counts as zero. The method is versioned, so a dignity reading can be traced to the exact rules that produced it. The machine may propose a score; only a person may lock it.

Where the facts come from

Every decision on the record is anchored to its public source, the bill text, the ordinance, the ruling, the order, the roll call, and those sources are linked so you can read them yourself. Nothing is canonical without a source. Contributions arrive as your addition, sourced and open to dispute, and enter the shared, canonical record only through human review. Records marked curated exemplar are illustrative, assembled to show how the tool reads a real decision, and are not attributed to any specific identified person.

The limits of a dignity reading

A dignity reading has limits. It measures the process and proximity of a decision, not its outcome, and it is only as good as the record it is built from, which can be incomplete, contested, or newly changed. It does not weigh whether a decision was ultimately beneficial or harmful, popular or unpopular, lawful or not. Where the record is thin, the tool says so rather than inventing certainty; where a score would need a source it does not have, that score counts as zero. Treat a dignity reading as a starting point for scrutiny, not a fact to be quoted.

Seats, not persons

Where a decision names who voted it in, UnImpact names the seat, “House district 42” - and links to the official roll call, rather than naming the individual who holds it. This keeps the record about accountable public offices and the public documents that describe them. The tool grades the decision and how it was made, never any person.

Lineage is a finding about text

When a decision’s language is shown to be reused from model legislation or another jurisdiction, that is a finding about text, and about nothing else. It attributes no motive, belief, or identity to anyone. An organization that publishes model legislation under its own name is named in that capacity, a political actor, its document cited, its reply invited, and in no other. The passages are quoted so you can check them against the sources yourself.

Impact records are people’s own accounts

An impact record is one person’s account of how a decision affected them, graded by the same engine. Records marked curated exemplar are illustrative, assembled to show how the tool reads a real decision, not the testimony of a specific identified person. Records people write for themselves are their own words.

This is not legal advice

UnImpact is an analytical and civic tool. Nothing here is legal advice, and a dignity reading is not a legal ruling, a finding of wrongdoing, or a statement of fact about any individual. If you need advice about a law or a decision, consult a licensed professional.

Corrections and right of reply

The record is meant to be checkable and contestable. If you represent a named body or organization, or you find an error, see Disputes & corrections, we review claims against the public record and publish responses.