Terms of Service

Last updated: August 6, 2026

1. What Citizen Voice is

Citizen Voice is a civic education and engagement platform. We help people understand who represents them, how legislation works, and give communities tools to draft and build support for their own proposals. Citizen Voice is not a government agency, is not affiliated with any elected official's office, and does not submit proposals to any legislative body on your behalf — proposals and petitions created here are community organizing tools, not an official government process.

2. Accounts and anonymous use

Most of the site works without creating an account — you're assigned an anonymous browser identity and a display name you choose. Some actions (signing a petition, submitting a proposal) require a real name and/or email, disclosed at the point we ask for it. You're responsible for anything posted from your identity, anonymous or not.

3. Content you post

You keep ownership of what you write — proposals, comments, community chat messages. By posting, you give Citizen Voice a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to display, format, and export that content on the platform (for example: generating a formatted PDF of a proposal, or a signature-list export for a petition). You're solely responsible for what you post, and you confirm you have the right to post it.

You agree not to post content that:

• Is illegal, threatens violence, or harasses another person
• Is defamatory, or that you know to be false
• Impersonates another person or organization
• Infringes someone else's intellectual property
• Is spam, or is an attempt to manipulate signature or vote counts

4. Petition signatures

Signing a petition on Citizen Voice means submitting your real legal name and email, and confirms you actually support the proposal you're signing. Submitting a signature under a false name, or signing the same petition more than once under different identities, undermines the purpose of the feature and violates these terms.

5. Voice rooms

Live voice rooms connect you with other people in real time, on topics tied to your community. Treat others the way you'd want to be treated in a public meeting: no harassment, threats, or targeted abuse. A moderator can remove you from a room or suspend your account for violating this. See Privacy Policy for how voice data is handled.

6. Moderation and account suspension

We use a combination of automated flagging (for example, unusually bursty posting) and human review to keep the platform usable. We can remove content, suspend an identity's ability to post, or reject a proposal or petition that doesn't meet these terms or our community guidelines, at our discretion.

7. No professional advice

Nothing on Citizen Voice — including Civic Academy lessons, representative information, or legislative summaries — is legal, financial, or professional advice. Verify anything you rely on against an official government source before acting on it.

8. Advertising

This site is supported by Google AdSense. See Privacy Policy for details.

9. Disclaimer of warranties

Citizen Voice is provided "as is," without warranties of any kind. We don't guarantee the site will be error-free, uninterrupted, or that representative or legislative data is complete or current — always verify against the official source.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Citizen Voice and its operators aren't liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of the site, including reliance on content posted by other users.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the platform changes. Continued use after an update means you accept the revised terms.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms: [add a contact email before launch — same address used in the Privacy Policy].