VoteReal

Inspiration

What is your local city council up to right now? Who is your representative? What bills did they help pass? These are all questions that we realized many (including us unfortunately) cannot answer. Ages 18-24 have historically had the lowest voter turnout for all levels of elections. National presidential races tend to get a lot of attention. However, local city elections also hold a lot of power over affecting our lives. We recognized a gap here and wanted to build something to help around this issue.

What it does

Vote Real is designed for a young adult audience in mind to inspire proactive and informed citizens. It is a gamified platform where users get to play along as a city council member, understand bills being voted on and make up their own minds about each one. Then, they get to see how their own city council members voted including their own district representative. Overtime, this “closeness” metric of how a user voted, opposed to how council members voted, will keep them in the loop. Instead of voting for representatives once a year and forgetting about it for the rest, the goal is to keep our leaders accountable.

How we built it

We built the app using React Native with Javascript, and we worked in VSCode and tested our app on our own phones using Expo Go. We all worked with Git and had different branches, merging as we went along.

Challenges we ran into

We faced some technical and non-technical challenges on the way. On the technical side, we wanted to make a mobile-app when no one on our team had a ton of experience with app building, thus, narrowing down to react-native and creating our app was a real growth opportunity for all of us. Another facet was the summaries for the bills. Not long after getting into a discussion with policy Professor and mentor Yoonsook Ha regarding our goal and app we realized how at the core of everything were the bill summaries being presented to users. Thus, summarizing them from an unbiased standpoint is essential. With the constraints of the hackathon in mind, we chose to create automated summaries for bills using ChatGPT. However, we recognize the actual and ethical implications introduced by doing so.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that were able to get a running app going, especially given our lack of experience with building apps in React Native.

What we learned

We learned a lot as a team. We learned quite a bit about app building and Javascript. We learned to come together as a team, and we became closer because of it. We also learned a lot about local politics and its importance, and also its complexity. We were shocked learning about how complex local government is and how it can be hard to hold local leadership accountable given the lack of transparency and complexity.

What's next for VoteReal

At Impact++, a RSO at the University of Washington that four of us are part of, we came into this hackathon looking to potentially work on an idea that could turn into a technical project for a group of developers in the club. I think since our idea itself is localized to the city of Seattle, I think the broad ideas behind VoteReal are something that could be interesting to explore as a club.