This public-facing reference explains how Electional turns a real-world goal into ranked timing windows. The system is not a generic daily horoscope and it is not an open-ended AI reading. It is a bounded scoring engine: birth data, location, intent, date range, and current sky in; auditable windows out.
What the engine is trying to answer
The core question is practical: "When is the strongest moment to act for this specific purpose?" Electional starts with a house-first model. A goal is mapped to a life topic, the topic is mapped to houses and planets, and the sky is tested against the user's natal chart.
The public product exposes this as a set of intents rather than asking the user to assemble rules by hand. Career, love, wealth, healing, protection, knowledge, spiritual work, release, and luck are not scored the same way. Each intent carries its own topic house, primary planets, support planets, caution planets, and operation tone.
Candidate windows
The engine first builds candidate windows from live planetary conditions. A window is not a single lucky minute. It is a time span with a peak, an entrance, an exit, and a visible explanation of what is applying, exact, separating, supportive, or blocking.
The Moon, planetary day, planetary hour, active transits, election chart condition, and natal contacts all matter, but none of them are allowed to explain the result alone. A strong window needs convergence. A weak window can still have one attractive symbol, but the receipt should show why it failed to rank.
The scoring layers
The score is additive and capped. Baseline election viability checks the general quality of the moment. House-topic alignment asks whether the chart actually speaks to the user's goal. Planetary intent fit checks whether the right planets are active in the right way. Natal compatibility asks whether the moment touches the user's own chart constructively. Final weighting ranks the window after gates and diagnostic adjustments.
This design keeps the answer readable. A user can inspect the pass totals, supporting hits, blocking hits, Moon condition, and rationale rows instead of trusting a black-box score.
Gates and warnings
Some failures should not be hidden by a few good-looking contacts. Electional uses gates when the chart is materially hostile to the operation: a debilitated primary stack, a Moon phase that clashes with the operation and is corroborated by other Moon problems, or sky conditions that inflate a topic without real natal support.
A gate does not mean "never do this." It means the engine should refuse to call the window excellent when the underlying chart argues otherwise. That distinction is important. The product can warn without pretending astrology produces certainty.
Transit-to-transit context
Plain sky events are included because they describe the weather everyone shares. A Venus-Jupiter trine can make a day feel easier; a Mars-Saturn square can make it heavier. But natal relevance gets priority. The same sky lands differently for different charts, so transit-to-natal evidence outranks a generic collective event.
What the receipt must show
Every result should answer three questions: what helped, what blocked, and why this goal was scored through this house and planet set. The visible receipt is the honesty layer. It prevents a polished paragraph from outrunning the math.
The reader should be able to say: "This window ranked because the right topic house was activated, the Moon supported the operation, the primary planets were not compromised, and the strongest contacts touched my chart." If the result cannot be traced that way, the copy should be softened or the window should not rank highly.
Product boundary
Electional scoring is a decision-support tool for timing. It does not make medical, legal, financial, or fatalistic claims. The output can say a moment is traditionally more supportive for a goal; it should not tell a user what will happen. The strongest public version of this system is specific, checkable, and modest about certainty.