How an issue makes the list

The Planks are not anyone's opinion. They're the output of this process. If you think the movement has a hidden agenda, this is the document to check it against. Ask which test is rigged.

Every Plank must pass all five. No exceptions.

Failing any one test disqualifies a candidate issue, no matter how urgent it feels.

1. The Consensus Test

Sustained public support of at least 70% nationally and at least 60% among self-identified members of each major party, shown in at least three independent, methodologically transparent polls spanning at least 18 months.

The cross-party floor is the whole point. 70% national support can hide a 95-to-45 partisan split. That's a wedge issue wearing a consensus costume, and the party floor is what keeps the list honest.

The commissioned-poll firewall: polling paid for or facilitated by this movement, or by its affiliates or donors, never counts toward this test, regardless of the firm's reputation. An issue with thin independent polling is pending, not passing. The movement waits, even when waiting hurts.

Neutral-wording standard: qualifying polls must ask about the policy in neutral terms. A poll framed around a named politician, party, or partisan package is context, never evidence. If qualifying polls diverge by more than 20 points on the same floor, that triggers an automatic pending status until the wording difference is explained.

Qualifying Pollster List: a qualifying poll also has to come from a pollster on the movement's published Qualifying Pollster List. A pollster gets on that list one of two ways: it carries a Silver Bulletin rating at or above the published grade threshold, or, for institutional and academic issue pollsters that don't have an election-polling grade, it can show documented rigor markers such as AAPOR Transparency Initiative membership or a Roper Center data deposit. The list itself is published, versioned, and frozen between Review Windows. A poll from a pollster not on the list is context we can mention, never evidence we can count.

2. The Action Test

There has to be a specific act Congress itself can take: a bill, a resolution proposing a constitutional amendment, a confirmation standard, or an appropriations condition. If the fix lives outside Congress's power, it can't be a Plank. We grade Congress on what Congress can do.

3. The Outcome Test

A Plank has to be written as a verifiable result, not a sentiment. Every Plank specifies, at adoption: the floor action (the exact bill or vote demanded), the passage standard (what "yes" means), the compliance test (what enforced looks like), and per-chamber gradable actions.

"Support transparency" is a sentiment. "Pass the enforcement amendment adding a private cause of action, and confirm no Attorney General who won't commit under oath to compliance" is a Plank.

4. The Grading Test

A member's compliance has to be reducible to recorded votes and documented official actions available to that member's chamber. If it can't be proven from the public record, it can't be graded. If it can't be graded, it can't be a Plank.

5. The Single-Subject Test

One Plank, one subject. No omnibus. No riders. No "and while we're at it." Bundling is how consensus dies.

Single subject means one outcome, not one legislative vehicle. A Plank can use more than one congressional lever (a bill, a confirmation standard, an appropriations condition) as long as every lever serves the same verifiable outcome. Bundling two different outcomes into one Plank is what fails this test, not using more than one tool toward a single goal.

The House and Senate are different machines

No member is ever graded on an outcome outside their individual power, only on whether they used every lever their own chamber gives them. Every Plank has to name its gradable actions for each chamber.

House levers: discharge petition signatures, recorded procedural votes, recorded floor votes, committee votes where recorded, and oversight actions.

Senate levers: cloture votes (the Senate has no discharge petition, so cloture is where floor access lives), recorded floor votes, confirmation votes measured against the Plank's standard, unanimous-consent actions, and oversight actions.

A senator who votes for cloture, votes for passage, and honors the confirmation standard has kept the Pledge in full, even if the bill dies, because those are every lever a single senator holds. A representative who withholds a discharge signature has broken it, even while claiming support, because that signature was the lever.

Never more than five Planks. Three is better.

Scarcity is credibility. A list of twenty demands is a platform, and platforms are partisan by nature. A list of three things that 70% of the country agrees on is a floor: the minimum viable performance standard for the body we all pay for.

The cap-selection rule: when more candidate issues qualify than the cap target, selection defaults to evidence-strength order. Any deviation from that order requires a published rationale before the Review Window closes. No silent skips, no silent picks.

Planks change once, on a schedule, never mid-cycle

Planks may be added or removed only during the 90 days following each federal general election, taking effect at the start of the new Congress.

Mid-cycle changes: never. If a candidate issue surfaces mid-term, it waits in the nomination queue. Passage doesn't remove a Plank either. A Plank comes off the list only when its compliance test is met; a law that passed but goes unenforced stays on the list and the grading shifts to the Enforcement column. There's no emergency exception, because the moment one exists, every cycle becomes an emergency.

Anyone can propose an issue. Every proposal gets the same test.

Nominations run through a staged funnel, not a straight yes-or-no. Each stage exists to protect the same thing: an issue only qualifies on evidence, never on how loudly it's argued.

1. The form is the first gate. A nomination has to state the outcome in one sentence, name the exact mechanism (the specific bill, not a topic), and link to at least two polls from the Qualifying Pollster List with party crosstabs. Missing any of those triggers an automatic educational decline that walks through the exact-mechanism rule and the Five Tests, so a rejected nomination still leaves with something useful.
2. An automated screen checks the basics: is every cited poll actually on the Qualifying Pollster List, do the crosstabs check out, and has this issue already been proposed or already rejected. Nominations that clear this screen move forward.
3. Survivors get a Test 1-only mini-dossier. A full five-test dossier, the kind published on On Deck, only gets built for nominations that clear the Consensus Test screen first. That's a deliberate ordering: don't spend research effort on an issue that can't clear the cross-party floor anyway.
4. The funnel's own numbers get published: how many nominations came in, how many passed the screen, how many got a full dossier opened. That count is part of the public record, the same as everything else here.

This funnel runs on automation behind the scenes. For now, the process above is what happens, and nominations are collected through the mailbox until that automation is fully wired up.

Every nomination, whether it's screened in or out, gets a public dossier: the polling evidence with independent sources cited, the specific congressional action, the proposed compliance test, and the per-chamber gradable actions. Nominations that fail a test are rejected with the failing test named publicly, including popular ones. Visible rejections of popular-but-partisan issues are the movement's best proof of good faith.

Name the bill. Not the topic.

Every Plank and every nomination dossier has to name the exact policy mechanism, a specific bill or a fully specified statutory design, never a topic area. A topic label can hide a huge support gap between two different bills that share a subject. Naming the exact mechanism is what keeps strong polling numbers from getting borrowed by a weak bill.

The numbers, set once and then left alone

• National threshold: 70%. Lower widens the list; higher may leave it empty.
• Party floor: 60% each party. The anti-wedge firewall. Lowered last, if ever.
• Duration: 18 months sustained. Blocks moral panics and news spikes.
• Recency: at least one qualifying poll within the trailing 12 months. Sustained means sustained through the present, not sustained at some point in the past.
• Poll count: 3 independent sources. Blocks single-pollster capture. Movement-commissioned polls never qualify.
• Qualifying Pollster List grade threshold: B or better on Silver Bulletin's rating. As of the January 2026 update, top-rated pollsters clearing this threshold include the Washington Post, Marquette, and NYT/Siena.
• Plank cap: 5 hard, 3 target.

What changed, and when