How verification works
A state gets color only after it survives the whole machine
Color on the map means one thing: a state passed every check below. Grey means we have not finished—and we do not fill the gap with a guess. Here is the actual pipeline a state runs before it earns a verdict.
01 / Primary sources
We start from the statute, not a summary
Every published answer traces to the enacted law, the administrative code, or the state motor-vehicle agency—not a blog, a forum, or a shop’s explainer.
Each state record lists its sources with the exact citation and a live URL. A source is tagged as primary (a statute or administrative code) or secondary (an agency’s own guidance), and an answer is not allowed to stand on a secondary source alone. If the primary law does not say it, we do not publish it as settled.
02 / Cited or marked unsettled
Every claim is either cited or openly flagged
A state page is built from individual claims—one per question a rider actually asks: does it need a license, is a helmet required, where can it ride. Each claim carries the specific sources it rests on, and each is stamped one of two ways:
- Cited
- The claim is backed by a primary source we can point to. The verification step confirms that every cited claim actually names a primary source—an answer that leans only on secondary guidance fails the check.
- Unsettled
- The sources do not answer the question cleanly. Rather than round it off, the claim is marked unsettled and shown as such on the state page and in every comparison—an honest blank instead of a confident wrong answer.
03 / An independent blind second pass
A separate reviewer re-derives the answers without seeing ours
The second pass never sees our answers. It reads the same primary sources cold and writes its own, so agreement means two independent reads landed in the same place.
The machine then compares the two answer sets claim by claim. A wording difference is noted as informational; a real disagreement—an answer the second pass could not corroborate, or a citation it could not stand up—is flagged as substantive. Nothing is waved through. A second pass only counts if it is recorded as independent and matches the exact set of claims currently published, so an old review cannot quietly vouch for edited text.
04 / Adjudication with the statute quoted
Disagreements are resolved against the law itself
When the two passes differ on something substantive, a person does not simply pick a side. Each disagreement gets a written verdict that quotes the governing statute and says whether the two reads are equivalent or in genuine conflict. A state clears this stage only when every substantive difference has been reconciled to the primary text; an unresolved conflict keeps the state grey.
05 / A computed receipt colors the map
Three green legs, or the state stays grey
The map is not colored by hand. A small program recomputes a receipt for each state, and all three legs must come back green before the state gets a verdict:
| Receipt leg | What it checks |
|---|---|
| Citations | Every claim published as settled actually names a primary source, and the state is marked verified. |
| Second pass | An independent, current second pass is on file and came back clean against the exact published claims. |
| Live source check | Each cited source is fetched again and its fingerprint still matches what we reviewed—if a statute page changes underneath us, the leg turns red. |
If any leg is red, the state renders grey and publishes no verdict. Right now 50 states + DC have all three legs green; 0 are not verified yet.
The standing promise
Color is earned, and it can be taken back
- We would rather show grey than publish a verdict we cannot cite to the primary law.
- A colored state can revert to grey the moment a source changes or a review goes stale—the receipt is recomputed, not remembered.
- New Jersey is the worked example, from the 2026 statute to the receipt.P.L.2025, c.285
See the machine’s output