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Getting started
1 of 5 · Home
Home is the daily read. It opens on your alignment score — how closely your representatives’ recorded votes match the issue positions you set — and below it, the bills that moved on your issues.
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Look at the score once a day and read the Daily Dispatch card. That is the whole app in thirty seconds: what changed, and whether it moved you closer to or further from the positions you stated.
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Tap the score to see it broken out by issue, so you can tell whether one issue is carrying the number. Ask a question in the search bar at the top and Citizen will answer from the bill record itself, with sources — it is the fastest way to check a claim you heard somewhere else.
Go to Home →2 of 5 · My Reps
Every representative for your address — federal and state — each scored against the issues you chose. The score comes only from public voting records. Never party, never opinion. Your governor is listed too, but without a score: governors sign about 95% of what reaches them, so a score would mostly measure the legislature. Open their profile to see their veto record instead.
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Open one representative and read their voting record. Each vote shows how it affected your score and why, so you can see the reasoning rather than take the number on faith.
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The scatter plot places a representative against their whole chamber on a single issue, so you can see whether a vote was typical for that body or a genuine outlier. Pro adds search across every current representative in the country, so you can look up anyone — not only your own.
Your representatives →3 of 5 · Bills
Every bill we track, filterable by issue, chamber, and status. Bill summaries and key provisions are AI-generated to save you reading time and are always labelled as such.
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Filter to one issue you care about and star a bill to follow it. Followed bills alert you when they advance, get a vote, or change status — so you find out from the app rather than from a headline.
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Open a bill to see the full timeline, every recorded vote, and how each of your own representatives voted on it. The “unscheduled vote” filter surfaces bills voted on with little public notice, which is hard to see any other way.
Browse bills →4 of 5 · Events
Upcoming election dates, your city and county government meetings, your registration status, a sample ballot, and your polling place. Election dates come from official Secretary of State records; ballot and polling details come from Google’s Civic Information service.
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Check your registration status and add the next election date to your calendar. Those two things take a minute and are the ones that actually expire.
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The elections guide explains how your state’s process works — deadlines, ID rules, and how to vote early or by mail — in plain procedural language, with links to the official source for anything that matters.
Events →5 of 5 · Alerts
Everything Citizen has told you, grouped by day so a busy week reads as a few cards instead of forty. Filter tabs narrow it to Bills, Votes, Scores, Elections, or Briefs.
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Skim the day bundles. A card showing a small up-arrow means that item raised your alignment; a down-arrow means it lowered it. Both are just direction — neither is a verdict on the representative.
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Settings → Notifications lets you set exactly which of these you receive and how often, including turning the Daily Brief into a weekly digest. Citizen caps itself at three notifications a day regardless, so turning things on cannot flood you.
Go to notifications →The notification help page covers what we send and when. The methodology page documents how classification and scoring actually work, and what their limits are.