The White Paper.

1. What PolitíCat is

PolitíCat NM is nonpartisan civic education for New Mexico, hosted by Don Gato Cívico. It shows what public records exist, what they say, and what is still unknown — then points you to the official source so you can verify it yourself. It is not a party, not a campaign, and not a government agency. Records first. Interpretation disciplined. Uncertainty visible.

2. How it's built

Two products with a hard boundary between them:

• Civic Substrate (the engine, private): collects public records, preserves the original documents with cryptographic fingerprints, tracks what changed, and prepares approved publication objects.
• PolitíCat (this site): publishes only approved, non-sensitive information — county pages, maps, explainers — always linking back to the source document. PolitíCat never touches raw evidence or personal data stores.

Every published claim carries one of four honest states — VERIFIED (the exact statement is supported by captured primary evidence), DEGRADED (evidence exists but something material is missing or stale), UNKNOWN (the record checked doesn't establish the answer), or REFUSED (we deliberately decline to render a verdict, and say why). No confidence percentages, ever. And one rule above all: verifying that somebody said something is not verification that it's true. A receipt means "this is the document we captured from this source on this date" — never "this claim is true."

3. How the site stays organized (the anti-sprawl canon)

4. Roadmap & checklist

Checked items are shipped and live. Dates are when the box was checked.

Shipped

• AUG 15 2026Six-page platform: front door + Ask, Explore, Learn, Trail, Community, About
• AUG 15 2026"Land of Enchantment" pictorial county map — all 33 counties clickable, real boundaries
• AUG 15 2026Nonpartisan disclaimer + contact on every page; analytics on every page; social-share meta
• AUG 15 2026Decision register D-001–D-004: evidence vocabulary, artifact custody, first citizen promise, product boundaries
• AUG 15 2026Map navigation: zoom, pan, miles scale, and private location pins (pins stay in your browser — nothing is uploaded)
• AUG 15 2026This white paper + full-width layout canon
• AUG 15 2026Pilot display v0: "How is this county changing?" on every county — registration change since 2021 from the SOS monthly series, with the data's end-date stated honestly; plus the county-trend query and the query layer's first tests

Now (August–September 2026)

• Independent counter-audit of the repository audit (Codex), then push the decision register
• Database backup verified restorable; credentials rotated
• Fresh voter-registration collection with retained source PDFs and receipts (fixes the site's May-2026 data + the app.js fallback copy)
• D-001 status resolver implemented with its six conformance tests
• Mobile layout overflow fixed site-wide; image diet (the 2.3 MB logo)
• Re-home or retire the two orphaned sections (Meet Don Gato onboarding, "Same Cat. Same Mission.")

Election season (September–November 2026)

• Elections dossier, entry #1: one county's "How is my county changing?" — registration change with source, date, limitations, and history (the D-003 pilot)
• Ballot-measure explainers for every certified 2026 amendment and bond question — what passes changes, what stays the same, who carries it out — with a printable take-to-the-polls notes sheet and shareable guides (from citizen feedback: "they just give you names, no context")
• Ballot basics in Learn: register, absentee, early voting, county clerk contacts — bilingual where possible
• AUG 15 2026Learn: "Who Handles What?" — one sourced federal · tribal · state · county · city matrix, 40 cells, a Verify link on every cell, official sources only (the Aug 15 mock concepts merged into a single Learn feature)
• AUG 15 2026Elections hub + navigation canon: Elections in the top nav, White Paper under About, one Ask entry (the button); Practice Ballot announced with its privacy pledge
• AUG 16 2026The civic terminal ships as a preview: Explore rebuilt as "See New Mexico in Motion" county strips; a civic profile page for every county with real registration + change data; the Practice Ballot preview; the Pulse feed preview; the pictorial map on its own Map View page. Concept columns labeled until their collections come online.
• AUG 17 2026The Trail rebuilt as "Follow the Record": How Power Moves (promise → power → process → outcome) with the first fully-receipted story — HB 9, captured from nmlegis.gov with SHA-256 on display — plus the honest vocabulary legend, story lifecycle table, source health, and the receipts pipeline explainer
• November 3 general election: dates and deadlines surfaced on the map's county snapshots

After the election (2027)

• PolitíCat Watch — government alerts that work like crypto alerts. You choose the target (bill, county, official, agency, subject), the exact triggers (introduced · committee assignment · hearing scheduled/rescheduled · comment opens/closes · wording change · amendment · vote approaching · passed/failed committee or chamber · signed/vetoed · effective date approaching · legal challenge), and the channel (Discord roles first — zero personal data stored — then opt-in email, then SMS). Every alert says why you got it, what changed, and what you can still do — "the committee meets Thursday, public comment is open" — with links to the change, the original record, and the committee. Alert people while they can still act, never merely after the news reports the result. Machinery: Civic Substrate collects → the change-detector diffs captures → Watch matches each person's rules → channels deliver only what was requested. Gate: scheduled collection + a data-minimalism decision before any contact info is stored.
• The Session Ledger — a public per-session report: bills introduced, heard, passed each chamber, signed & chaptered, vetoed, defeated by recorded vote, or ended with no final action — stated exactly that way, because a bill that died without a vote was not voted down, and pretending otherwise invents positions nobody took. Organized by legislative session first (NM: 60-day odd years, 30-day even years, specials separate; the 2026 session ran Jan 20–Feb 19), with quarters as the secondary year view. Every recorded vote shows yes/no/absent/excused by name, party at the time of the vote, the threshold, the exact bill version, and the roll-call document. Views: session funnel, outcome chart, weekly activity timeline, side-by-side party bars (never a pie), "how my lawmakers voted" first, and a Watch button on everything. First entry is already evidence-grade: our captured HB 9 record contains the House 40–29 and Senate 24–15 tallies.
• Coverage terminal: 33 counties, alphabetical, showing the condition of our evidence per source family — never ranking counties
• The Pulse feed engine: RSS ingestion of NM outlets + official feeds, clustered into single event cards by story, every item badged by source class; checkable claims checked against records (never outlet-vs-outlet "truth scores"); disagreements shown as CONTESTED; social sources last, behind authenticity rules
• County drill-down pages consuming approved publication objects (read-only) from Civic Substrate
• Water & data-center dossier on the five evidence lanes: claimed → in agreements → filed with regulators → independently observed → still unknown
• Map layers, each gated on verified public-record sourcing: water rights evidence, publicly documented camera infrastructure (from contracts and council minutes — we document systems, never track activity)
• The yearbook layer: county officials with faces, ballot lineups — gated on the image-rights custody rules

The promise (2028)

• Any New Mexican can open PolitíCat and see what changed in their community, who or what official body the record associates with it, and where to verify it

5. Changelog

• AUG 21 2026Zia retired, C-glyph installed: the coral-and-turquoise C-glyph is now the site mark (nav, footer, favicon, social cards, Ask avatar); every Zia-bearing asset removed from the repo (old logo, banner, hero background); the Ask answer now explains the retirement honestly — the Zia sun is sacred to Zia Pueblo, and it belongs to them; site images also got ~4 MB lighter
• AUG 17 2026Map Room density pass — no empty space canon applied: the map card is now a full spread (Map Key + Quick Jump to all 33 counties | the map | Hidden Treasures finder), and the county picker joined the layers bar in one full row
• AUG 17 2026Map Room dressed in commissioned art: Sandia tram panorama header (title on the route shield), the county map now sits on the investigator's night table (VLA, UFO, and Bigfoot on watch), and a Route 66 · Blue Hole · White Sands panorama closes the page
• AUG 17 2026Civic Explorer shipped (civic-explorer.html, under Learn): "Follow One New Mexico Dollar" — a layered night-map walkthrough built from commissioned art (map, glowing route, Don Gato investigator as separate layers), eight live checkpoints, a traveling coin, and the till-receipt system where every claim wears VERIFIED / DEGRADED / UNKNOWN honestly — including refusing to print numbers whose sources aren't captured yet
• AUG 17 2026Elections rebuilt for big screens: six voter-action cards that scale from 1 to 6 columns by screen width (density by columns, per canon), a taller hero that shows the whole Secretary Meow scene, and clear contrast bands — dark art hero, parchment tools, teal footer
• AUG 17 2026Wallpapers actually visible at last: found and fixed the silent 404 that had hidden every background (a stylesheet path-resolution bug), boosted the art to full strength, gave section headers parchment plates, and hardened Pulse's card borders — verified with rendered screenshots of the live site before and after
• AUG 17 2026Design consistency canon: parchment-with-burnt-edges boxes and hover motion everywhere (Elections tools, Learn questions, White Paper hubs, Trail legend & pipeline), art behind every page hero, wallpaper scrims lightened so the art reads clearly
• AUG 17 2026The Map Room: map page rebuilt full-screen with the layers bar (counties LIVE; water, data centers, public cameras, roads, lodging PLANNED); county clicks now open a dashboard with a direct door to each county page; Map restored to the top nav on every page
• AUG 17 2026Wallpaper visibility fixed site-wide (removed fixed-attachment backgrounds that hid the art and janked scrolling; lighter scrims), smooth anchor scrolling added, and every page now carries its wallpaper — Learn, Ask, About, Ballot, County, and the White Paper included
• AUG 17 2026Community rebuilt as "New Mexico Is Talking" from the user's mockup: full-bleed hero, Trending in New Mexico (real receipted stories only), verify bar, brand-colored Choose Your Corner, and Meet the Community Crew — three new cast members join (Río Ranger, Data Paws, Barrio Buddy) alongside Don Gato, Chispa, and Secretary Meow
• AUG 17 2026Wallpapers moved behind the content: commissioned art now backs the sections themselves (Home platform cards, Explore strips, Pulse feed, Elections tools, Community, The Trail) with readability scrims, so the boxes float on the scene instead of on flat color
• AUG 17 2026Storybook format adopted for step-by-step government processes: How Power Moves rebuilt as a four-chapter book (magazine spreads, footnoted citations, chapter rail, page-turn controls) — the template for telling every future Trail story
• AUG 17 2026Vista wallpaper bands shipped: four commissioned sunset scenes (Don Gato, Chispa, SOS cat, the duo) installed as full-bleed parallax interludes on Home, Explore, Pulse, and Elections; cache tokens unified site-wide
• AUG 17 2026Follow the Record shipped on The Trail: HB 9 pipeline story with a real capture receipt (SHA-256 shown on page), What's Moving table, Source Health rail, and the Honest Vocabulary legend
• AUG 16 2026Civic terminal preview deployed: Motion county strips (Explore), 33 county civic profiles, Practice Ballot, Pulse feed, Map View page; Pulse added to nav; edge-to-edge everywhere
• AUG 15 2026Elections hub shipped; nav restructured per the approved county-page review; legislative roster collected as 112 seat records (68+2 vacant House, 42 Senate) with capture receipts in Civic Substrate
• AUG 15 2026"Who Handles What?" civics matrix shipped in Learn — 40 cells, every one linked to an official source; tribal-jurisdiction cells say "depends" where that is the honest answer
• AUG 15 2026County change block shipped (pilot display v0): every county now answers "how is my county changing?" from 61 months of SOS data — newest month labeled, fresh collection in progress
• AUG 15 2026White paper created; full-width canon adopted; map navigation + pins shipped; D-001–D-004 recorded in the Civic Substrate decision register
• AUG 15 2026Six-page platform + pictorial county map deployed to politicatnm.org
• JUN 05 2026County voter snapshots refreshed to SOS 2026-05 data