Opinions apart from evidence

Voice keeps three things apart that a casual design would merge: what a person says they experience, what the record shows, and what people would prefer. Each is shown with its own label, and none is ever rendered as another.

A concern is a statement

A confirmed concern is one person's statement of what they experience or value, in their own meaning. It is never an assertion about the world, so nothing in Voice turns a concern into a claim. The model that proposes a concern adds nothing the participant did not say, asks no question that proposes a cause or a culprit, and its proposal is nothing until the participant confirms it.

Evidence has provenance

A claim on an issue is derived from evidence, and evidence is a passage from a named source with a date, kept in the reasoning service and read from it each time it is shown. Voice adds what a reader is owed and the reasoning service has no field for: the scope the evidence covers, the authority behind the source, and its limitations. A claim is explained from its records, with the claims that contradict it on the same hypothesis beside it, and a question with no accepted evidence gets an abstention rather than an answer. Evidence and the public issue.

An opinion is counted, never cited

A priority, a trade-off and a consideration are opinions: a participant's statement of what they value. Each is sealed like any personal value and never appears in an evidence or claim view. What the public sees is an aggregate: counts of participants by priority level and by stance on each option, with four pieces of labelling that are never left off:

• the sample: how many participants, and that they chose themselves;
• the method: one expression per participant per issue, an amended priority replacing the earlier one, a withdrawn one not counted;
• the window: the period the counts cover;
• the caveat: that these are statements by the participants who chose to answer, opinions, not evidence, saying nothing about the proportion of all constituents who hold them.

A cell with fewer participants than the suppression threshold, five unless configured otherwise, is omitted and marked suppressed, so a small group cannot be read back to its members. No individual is ranked, and no profile is inferred: Voice holds no demographic, no ideological position and no ranking of participants.

An option is described, never endorsed

A policy option carries a title, a description, costs, benefits and open questions. There is no field for a recommendation or a ranking, and a body that carries one is refused. A representative's dashboard labels every participant-derived measure as such and makes no claim about the population.

Why

The product's defence against plausible but false prose is provenance; its defence against treating the loudest as the majority is the label. A representative who reads an issue should be able to tell, at a glance, which sentence a person said, which a source supports, and which a group prefers, and to act on each as what it is.