A sourced answer, handed to the people who can act on it
TransparencyGap compares what South Carolina’s governments say against what their own records show, and gives the gap to the legislators and citizens who can do something about it.
Most civic argument runs on opinion. The premise here is narrower and more checkable: pick one question, find the standard the law already sets, and measure the public record against it. The result is a yes or a no with a citation, not a position.
Audit, not advocacy
The aim is not to rank counties or to shame them; it is to make the gaps visible. A legislator with a stalled bill gets sourced data to justify a hearing. A citizen gets an answer they can verify instead of a take they have to trust. When the record supports the agency, that is a finding too, and it is published.
Pragmatic, local, sourced
The work is tribe-agnostic by design. It is built to be read the same way by either party’s staff, because the only thing it argues is the record. Every claim links to a primary document, and every document is archived on access, so the evidence outlives the link.
Where this is
This is early. The county transparency census is compiled and in verification; individual audits are in the same pipeline. What is shown here is a working preview, marked where the data is still internal. Nothing is published until it has cleared review.
If your numbers differ from ours, the discrepancy is the story. Every audit points back to the same record so you can check it yourself.