Certification

Certification is a means of verifying your current location. Once you are certified, your votes are deemed as coming from a real person in a real location. This adds to the validity of our grades and ensures we aren't just another automated system. Since your location is verified, your representatives will also be able to see results that are more meaningful. Please keep in mind certification is not required for you to use our application.

You only have to certify yourself one time and it will last forever; however, if you move out of your zip code you will need to re-certify.

The cost to you is minimal. We outline 3 ways to get certified.

• Paypal/Credit Card Payment - $5.00+
• Fax - 1 minute of Long Distance
• Digital Scanner - Free
• Postal Mail - $0.42 (7/23/09)

By certifying your votes, you benefit other users of the site as well as the site itsself. Our grades will only be taken serious if they come from real people. It's almost as if you dropped your ballot in the ballot box. Not that we actually do that much anymore, but you get the idea.

Here is a list of a few of the benefits:

• Your vote is added to the grades pool (we only report grades using certified votes)
• Other members will see your votes in their reports *
• Our grades are taken serious by public officials and the press

* Personal information will remain private

Moneys collected through PayPal/Credit Card verifications go back into the site. This includes server leases, administrative fees (data licenses, software development, etc), and site promotion. The biggest expense right now is server leasing. Because of the mountain of data we have to analyze a cheap hosting solution wouldn't work.

Also, you may notice, we currently don't have advertising on the site. We'd like to keep it that way! We also would like to stay independent and not funded by any advocacy groups or 3rd parties that could compromise our independence.