Inspiration
In 2024, during the General Election, thousands of Santa Clara County residents (including us!) received a ballot and the Santa Clara County Voter Information Guide—a 44-page long rundown of each candidate and ballot measure. Critical to making informed voting decisions, this guide presents lengthy, densely worded explanations of ballot initiatives—many of which have significant implications for local communities. As students who are now voters, we have heard from friends and other adults that their struggles with the voter guide can lead to confusion or distress, a lack of clarity on what to vote for, and decreased enthusiasm for civic engagement and the election process.
Furthermore, the phenomenon of “undervoting” can be exacerbated by this confusion. In the 2024 General Election, counties in the United States had up to 9% undervoting on various propositions, from tiny Alpine County in California to the much more sizable Harris County in Texas. In each of these cases, the outcomes of various races may have changed had there been fewer ‘undervoters’.
For this project, we have decided to begin our focus right here in Santa Clara County, as we already have a young and inexperienced (and frankly, impatient) voter base yet to be tapped. We also zeroed in on one piece of voting often neglected by ‘undervoters’: ballot measures. These pieces of legislation are key sticking points for voters, and their complexity often leads to disengagement—yet they shape policies that directly impact communities. By addressing this critical gap, we aim to empower voters with the knowledge and confidence needed to navigate ballot measures effectively, recognizing that their participation in these decisions is fundamental to a truly representative democracy.
What it does
VoteSmart is an AI companion built to understand a user’s political leanings and assist in the voting process. Our mission is to increase voter awareness with a transparent and comprehensive AI that eliminates the verbose terminology often found in a Voter Handbook. By leveraging AI to cultivate a culture of deeper engagement in the democratic process, we aim to empower voters with greater autonomy while restoring trust among those disillusioned by an often needlessly complex voting system.
Once their profile is saved with their political preferences, a user can immediately view their customized ballot, featuring propositions relevant to their city. Most importantly, artificial intelligence tailors ballot measure descriptions to their political leanings, offering a straightforward Yes or No voting recommendation. No more falling prey to circular language, dense jargon, or skipping votes out of frustration. VoteSmart encourages participation while giving users the autonomy to learn more about what their vote really means.
How we built it
We used TreeHacks' website starter repo as a lifting-off point, then added our own functionality and style. We recognized immediately that a website would be the most accessible manner to reach our users and create an effective tool to serve them. We used Windsurf to fill gaps in our technical skills, and develop a functional base we could build off of. We also drew inspiration from the Depolarizing GPT framework, which seeks to reduce political polarization by offering a multi-perspective approach to political issues.
Challenges we ran into
As first time hackathon attendees, building our own application (from scratch!) was extremely intimidating, and we had to teach ourselves many complex coding concepts as we built our site. Using Windsurf was also a learning curve, as we discovered how to tailor our prompts and find the most efficient ways to use the program, while still incorporating our own technical skills and stylistic choices.
What we learned
We now know how to create a website from scratch, run it locally with Flask, and iteratively improve our UI to provide the best user experience. We also learned about NLTK for language processing, as well as how to use Github to streamline our code commits.
What's next for VoteSmart
Our plan is to expand our application to counties across the country, include political candidates in addition to propositions, and offer a wider variety of languages. We currently have a version of VoteSmart that uses OpenAI to more comprehensively offer voting recommendations to users, and would like to obtain an API key to fully implement this in the future.
It’s all about inclusion, education, and engagement! And until then, we hope you VoteSmart!
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.