Jersey · FAQs
Questions and challenges
These are the questions States Members put to us, with the answers we give them, published so every member and every voter gets the same answer without having to email in. This scorecard follows the Guernsey Deputy Scorecard, which we built first — Jersey is the same method applied to a second Assembly, not a separate project. For how a promise is scored, and what the two islands do differently, see the methodology.
Who is behind this
Who built the scorecard, who is paying for it, and where it came from.
- Who is paying for this? Who is your client?
- No one, and there isn’t one. This is unpaid work, built and maintained by Bridgehead Communications on our own initiative. It was not commissioned by any member, party, committee, Minister or third party, in Jersey or anywhere else.
- Why Jersey? Did this start here?
- No. It started in Guernsey. We built the Guernsey Deputy Scorecard first, for the States of Deliberation, and launched it in August 2026. The Jersey States Member Scorecard is the same method applied to a second Assembly, because the argument for it does not stop at one island: if a record of promises against votes is worth having in Guernsey, it is worth having in Jersey. Guernsey remains the older and more complete of the two, and where the two sites differ it is usually because Jersey’s public record supports something Guernsey’s does not, or vice versa.
- Is Jersey being graded on Guernsey’s rules?
- On the same principles, not the same rules. The scoring core is the same, manifesto promises set against recorded votes with each judgement tied to a source. But several Guernsey-specific decisions were deliberately left out because they have no Jersey basis. There is no special weighting for any single tax or policy here. Attendance is computed differently, from the Assembly’s own recorded reasons. And Jersey has two Assemblies on the site at once, a closed 2022–2026 record and the live 2026–2030 term, which Guernsey does not.
- Why is a UK-registered company doing this?
- Bridgehead is registered in London, and the person who built this is a Channel Islander with family in the islands. The scorecard draws only on records the States Assembly and vote.je already publish, and nothing about where the company is registered changes what data it can see or how a promise is scored.
- Is this connected to any client work?
- No. This scorecard has no connection to any client, past or present, and no bearing on how any client or their work is covered elsewhere.
Where the information comes from
What the site is built out of, what it is not, and where the record falls short.
- Is any of this new information about a member?
- No. Every input is already public: the States Assembly’s own recorded votes and ballot records, its published register of members and their Records of Service, the Assembly’s post-holder dataset on opendata.gov.je, and the manifestos candidates put in front of voters on vote.je. We have not created a body of facts about anyone. We have gathered what is already on the record into one place and shown the source for each item, so anyone can check us.
- If it is all public already, why does this site need to exist?
- Because most of the difficulty is form rather than substance. The information largely exists, but spread across feeds, PDFs and a candidate site that is not always linked from its own navigation, and it is not joined up: nothing publicly connects what a member promised to how they later voted. When a record is that hard to use, the space gets filled by assertion with no sourcing at all. A sourced, correctable record is a far better defence for a member than an unsourced argument about them.
- Where do the manifestos come from?
- From each candidate’s own page on vote.je, the States Greffe’s election site, for the election that returned them. We link the exact page each promise was extracted from, so any member can see what text their promises were read out of. One trap worth naming, since it would produce a real error: vote.je gives a returning candidate a new page each election, and a URL built from their name alone returns the previous election’s manifesto with a perfectly normal-looking page. Every manifesto we attach is checked against that page’s own “Candidate Elected” year before it is used.
- Why publish attendance figures at all?
- In most democracies member attendance is published as a matter of routine, and Jersey’s own record supports it well. The Assembly records a reason against every non-vote, so being ill, off-island, on parental leave, presiding, or barred by a declared interest can be told apart from simply not turning up. Absences with an accepted reason are removed from both sides of the rate rather than held against the member. Declaring a conflict of interest must never read as an absence. We don’t characterise a figure as good or bad; we show it and let voters draw their own conclusions.
- Is this written by AI? Could it invent a vote?
- Vote outcomes, ballots and attendance come straight from the official record with no model involved at all. A model does read promises out of a manifesto, match a promise to the votes that bear on it, judge whether a vote breaches a promise and draft a biography. In every one of those the code decides what is published, not the model. Biographies are grounded only in the Assembly’s register and the member’s own manifesto, and are checked in code before publication: a draft that claims an office the member’s own Record of Service does not contain is rejected, not published.
- Does the site cover what members say in the chamber?
- Not yet. Guernsey’s scorecard carries speaking activity, verified quotes and debate analysis because we ingest that Assembly’s Hansard. Jersey’s equivalent transcripts are not ingested here, so this site has votes but no speech layer, and we would rather say that than imply a completeness it does not have.
- There is a vote listed under my promise that has nothing to do with it.
- Check which of the two lists it sits in. The votes that test the promise are the scored ones, and they drive the Kept, Broken or Mixed label. Below them, under Related votes, are the ones judged too partial or indirect to count; they are shown for context and labelled as not counting towards the score. A vote appearing on a page is not the same as a vote being scored against a member. If something in the scored list does not belong there, use the challenge link on that ruling, because that is a genuine error and we have corrected a number of them.
How a vote counts against a promise
The single most important rule on the site, and the one most likely to affect your own page.
- When does a vote count against one of my promises?
- Only when it plainly contradicts it. Every vote that goes against delivering a promise is adjudicated separately, and it is counted only where almost anyone reading the promise and the motion together would agree the vote runs against the promise. Where calling it a breach needs an inference, an assumption about your motives, or a judgement about whether one particular measure was the right way to honour a general commitment, it is not counted. Doubt is resolved in the member’s favour.
- So voting against a budget amendment isn’t a broken promise?
- Usually not, no. If you promised to support investment in community care and voted for seven such measures but against three specific funding amendments, that is not a repudiation of the promise. You may have preferred a different route, judged one measure unaffordable or premature, or pursued the aim another way. Those votes are shown on your page, with the reason they were set aside, but they do not grade the promise. The same goes for procedural votes, votes on timing, funding levels, reporting or board membership, and votes on a different mechanism in the same policy area.
- Why is the bar higher for evidence against me than for evidence in my favour?
- Deliberately, because the two kinds of error are not equivalent. Leaving a promise recorded as outstanding understates a member’s record, which is a shortcoming of the site. Calling a promise broken on a contestable inference is a false statement about a named person, which is a different order of harm. So a vote counts in a member’s favour on the same terms as before, and counts against them only when the breach is unambiguous.
- What happens to a promise where nothing clearly bears on it?
- It is recorded as outstanding, and it is not scored either way. An honest “no recorded vote bears on this yet” is a better answer than a forced verdict, and it does not count against you.
- Does that not make the scorecard toothless?
- No. Clear breaches still count, and are still published as broken or mixed. What the rule removes is the large middle ground of arguable inferences, which is where a scorecard does most of its unfair damage and where its judgements are least defensible if challenged. A smaller number of well-founded adverse findings is worth more than a large number of contestable ones.
- A procedural vote went against something I was trying to do. Does that count?
- No, in either direction. A vote on the lodging period, on adjournment, or on suspending Standing Orders is not a vote on the policy, and a member can vote either way on one for reasons that have nothing to do with what they think of the measure. Scoring them would put positions on members’ pages that they never took. They are left out of the promise matching altogether, unless the promise is itself about that process.
- Does a promise only count as Kept if the motion passed?
- No. A promise is kept when a member voted to deliver it. Whether the motion carried is no part of the test, so a member who votes for a proposition that is then defeated has still kept the promise. A promise does not have to end up in law either.
- Why measure votes rather than the effort a member put in?
- A recorded vote is the one thing that holds every member to identical terms. It happened or it did not, a member voted one way or the other, and the Assembly’s own record settles which, whatever account is given afterwards. Effort has a partial record. A proposition or amendment a member lodges is published, so the fact of the work is provable. What publication cannot show is the difference between lodging something and working to get it into a position where it could pass, and those are not the same act. Scoring effort would also put a member’s own account of how hard they tried at the centre of a scorecard whose purpose is to check them. Where a member’s work never reaches a recorded vote, the promise is recorded as outstanding rather than held against them.
- A vote everyone supported is being cited as evidence I kept a promise. Is that fair?
- Yes. You made a commitment, a vote on it came before the Assembly, and you voted to deliver it. That you kept your word does not become less true because colleagues voted the same way, and a member who never made that commitment gains nothing from the same division, because they have no promise for it to test. What a lopsided tally tells a reader is something about the promise rather than the vote. A commitment nothing in the Assembly opposed was an undemanding one to make, and keeping it says less about a member than keeping a contested one. That is why every scored vote now carries its division tally, so a promise kept without opposition reads differently from one carried narrowly instead of both reading simply as kept. The reverse case is stronger still: a member who votes against a motion almost everyone else supports has done something genuinely revealing, and we treat it that way.
Fairness to members
The judgement calls, the things the record cannot see, and what we do about both.
- Isn’t this just a hit piece on members?
- We don’t pass opinion on how any member voted, only on whether the vote matches what they promised, and only where that is clear. Each member’s page also carries their full Record of Service from the Assembly’s own register, their media coverage, and a challenge route on every individual ruling.
- What is the hardest part of this to get right?
- Usually the manifesto rather than the method. The hardest judgements are interpretive, not factual: a commitment written broadly can plausibly bear on several votes, or none. That is why the connection between a promise and a vote is graded, why weak connections appear as unscored context, and why an adverse vote has to clear a separate test before it counts at all.
- A member might do most of their work in Scrutiny or behind the scenes. Doesn’t that make the scorecard unfair to them?
- That is a real limitation and we state it plainly rather than claiming otherwise. The scorecard measures what is on the public record: manifesto promises against recorded votes, plus attendance and the offices a member has held. It does not capture private negotiation, Scrutiny-level influence, or work that never produces a public document. We are open to ways of making it fairer to members whose impact is mostly off the record.
- A member might genuinely change their mind once they see the facts. Shouldn’t that count differently to breaking a promise?
- There is a real distinction between not having a fully formed view and stating a clear position then reversing it once elected. If any reversal could be waved through as vindication, there would be no accountability left in the exercise, because almost any change of position can be justified after the fact. The fairer approach is to record what was said, log how the vote actually went, and let voters decide whether the circumstances justified the change. The breach test above does a lot of this work already: a vote that could reasonably reflect a different route to the same goal is not counted as a breach in the first place.
- Isn’t it too early to judge members elected in June 2026?
- Yes, and the site says so rather than papering over it. The 2026–2030 Assembly has held only a handful of recorded votes, so almost every promise on it is recorded as tracked and untested, and no delivery verdicts have been generated against it. What is already published for this term is the promise inventory and attendance. The graded record on a returning member’s page is their 2022–2026 term, and it is labelled as the closed term throughout.
- Why are there two Assemblies on my page?
- Because most members of the 2026–2030 Assembly also sat in 2022–2026, and their record there is the substantive one for now. A returning member’s page carries both: the live term’s promises at the top, and the closed term’s graded record below, each labelled with which Assembly it belongs to. Guernsey’s scorecard has one live term and no equivalent.
Corrections and contact
How to get something changed, and whose job it is to check the work.
- What if something on my page is wrong?
- Use the “Report a profile issue” button on your own page, or the challenge link on any individual ruling you think is wrong. Both come straight to us. Every change we make is listed on the corrections page.
- Am I expected to check your work every month?
- No, and that is not the design. Accuracy is ours to own. The feedback and challenge routes exist to give you a fast way in, not because verification has been handed to you. Where we have got something wrong, the correction is logged publicly rather than quietly applied.
- If an editorial correction is made, does it survive the next automated run?
- Yes, and that is by design. The promise-to-vote matching re-runs, and an unprotected manual fix would be overwritten by it. Editorial corrections, suppressions and adjudications are pinned in the data and carried across each re-run, so a correction cannot be quietly undone by the next job.
- Can I talk this through with someone rather than filling in a form?
- Yes. Ask for a call in the feedback form on your page and we will ring you. We would far rather have a challenge than leave something wrong on the page.
Still not answered
Use the “Report a profile issue” button on your own page, or the challenge link on any individual ruling. Every change we make is listed on the corrections page.
Who builds this
The Jersey States Member Scorecard is built, paid for and maintained by Bridgehead Communications, a PR, public affairs and reputation consultancy. No member, party, States committee or campaign funds it. Nobody pays to appear on it, and nobody pays to have an entry corrected.
We publish it to showcase the best of Channel Island politics, and to help readers see the vibrancy, and sometimes the sheer grind, behind the contributions made in the chambers of both Guernsey and Jersey.