What this index refused

Every other page here reports what was established. This one reports what was thrown away — because an index that admits everything has decided nothing, and the decisions are the product.

Two independent gates, and an article has to clear both. The resolver decides which seat, party or person a string denotes; it matches exactly or not at all. The relevance gate decides whether the article is election coverage in the first place. Neither can do the other's job, and the first version of this index had only the first one.

Gate one — is this election coverage at all?

A story that mentions a place is not a story about that constituency. This gate scores each article on electoral vocabulary, its upstream category, its topics and the organisations named in it; below the threshold nothing is resolved from it at all.

This is the whole argument, measured rather than asserted. Crime and sport arrive in bulk and are almost never admitted; politics is admitted more than half the time. The gate was added because a car-arson story in the township of Bandar Kinrara had been published as coverage of a state seat — the name matched correctly, and the claim was still false. Categories here are the upstream newsroom's own labels, not this index's, and cover the 83,721 articles that arrive with one.

The two paths hold different evidence and are gated differently. A newsroom article arrives with nothing said about elections, so it must earn 3 points. An item fetched by searching for a named seat already carries the fact that someone looked for that seat, so it is admitted at 2 — and the front page's feed then filters harder still, so a weak match appears on its seat's own page, where it is one row among many carrying its own score, and never as the lead.

Gate two — is this a name the registry knows?

The resolver matches exactly or returns nothing. It never falls through to the closest name, so a string it does not know goes to a human review queue instead of becoming a wrong answer. These are the loudest of them.

Places — 807 strings, 388 occurrences

A further 144 place strings have been read by a person and permanently suppressed, on top of the 285 names — states, countries, foreign capitals — the resolver refuses before it looks anything up.

People — 1,634 strings, 3,526 occurrences

One reason for all of them: no candidate in the registry carries this name exactly. The registry is a candidate roll, so royalty, foreign leaders, commentators and officials are all correctly absent from it — and so are real politicians whose name the roll spells differently. Which of those a string is takes a person to decide, and until someone has, it is nobody.

Parties & organisations — 435 strings, 593 occurrences

Nearly every one of these is a real organisation that is not a political party — a pollster, a statutory body, a broadcaster, a government-of-the-day label. They are refused because the registry holds parties and coalitions, and being named in political news does not make something one.

The resolver, refusing

Each of these runs through the live resolver as this page is built. Nothing below is a stored answer — change a rule and this page changes.

Type your own into the seat lookup — it runs the same resolver in your browser against the same registry, and refuses the same way.

No article is shown on this page, and that is deliberate. A refused string is one about which nothing was established. Printing it beside a headline would manufacture exactly the association these gates exist to prevent, with this index's authority behind it. Strings and counts only.