Weighted composite, 0–100. Identical to the figure on the Congress monitor. Each bar is the component's normalised 0–100 contribution before weighting.
01
Silence on donor-funded topics 0
Topics where donors have documented interests but the official has no public statement on record. Silence is the absence of expected speech — not proof of intent.
No active silence flags on donor-funded topics.
02
Vote-vs-platform contradictions 1
Roll-call votes that contradict the official's own stated platform commitments. Each links to the bill and the contradiction rationale.
14.3% of 7 rated votes contradicted the stated platform
One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — House passage, May 22, 2025; Senate amendment, July 3, 2025
why contradicted?
[against_constituent] Zinke voted yea on legislation the CBO projected would add $3.4 trillion to deficits and cut approximately $1 trillion from Medicaid and SNAP. He successfully stripped the public lands sales provision but ultimately supported the bill, touting its tax relief and border security provisions. His MT-01 district has a 6% poverty rate and $73,598 median household income — relatively affluent by national standards — but thousands of rural Montanans, seniors, and children depend on Medicaid and SNAP. The AFL-CIO opposed the bill. Only 2 House Republicans voted nay. The Flathead Beacon wrote that Zinke and the entire Montana delegation 'abandoned Montana by falling in step with Trump.' Zinke's vote was 96% party-aligned per LegisLetter. He also voted yea on the FY2025 Budget Resolution that set the framework for the bill.
Documented public commitments paired with the documented action that broke them. Each carries a primary-source citation for the violation.
No documented broken promises on file.
04
Documented contradictions 3
Stated-position-vs-revealed-conduct contradictions analysed against the official's commitments, scored by strength of the contradiction.
statement_vs_disclosureSCORE 90
Zinke's career as a decorated Navy SEAL and his pledge to serve with integrity are directly undercut by the Interior Department Inspector General's findings that he 'misused his office to advance a commercial development project,' 'knowingly made false statements to federal investigators,' and 'lied to ethics officials' — resulting in his resignation in 2019 after at least six federal ethics investigations. The contrast between his oath as a military officer and his documented ethical violations as a cabinet secretary is among the starkest of any sitting member of Congress.
platform_vs_voteSCORE 90
Zinke campaigned as a fiscal conservative and touted his success in removing public lands sales from the OBBBA, yet voted for a bill the CBO projected would add $3.4 trillion to the deficit — while making no mention of the deficit impact in his press release. He claimed the bill 'makes Medicaid and SNAP stronger' while it cut approximately $1 trillion from Medicaid. The Flathead Beacon called this a betrayal of Montana values. His removal of the public lands provision gave him political cover to vote for a bill that was otherwise catastrophic for the federal balance sheet — directly contradicting his fiscal-conservative brand.
statement_vs_disclosureSCORE 60
Zinke's official website invites constituents to request meetings and he claims to be accessible, yet by summer 2025 he was refusing to hold in-person town halls, joining the entire Montana GOP delegation in avoiding public constituent forums under orders from Republican leadership. The Montana Democratic Party organized 'Empty Seat Town Halls' to protest his absence, and the Billings Gazette editorial page called him a 'coward.'
Every figure above is a count of records the platform already holds, each click-through-able to its source. The scorecard adds no inference, no forecast, and no narrative — it aggregates what is documented.
A populated scorecard is not a finding of corruption. It documents the volume of stated-vs-revealed tension, donor-adjacent silence, and broken commitments on the public record for this official. Silence in particular is the absence of an expected statement; it can have innocent explanations and is never presented as proof. Read each item's source before drawing conclusions.
