Local elections have some of the lowest turnout, even though they shape the policies people feel every day.
- In the 100 largest U.S. cities, average mayoral-election turnout was 20.2%, and 73 of 100 cities were below 25% turnout. [1]
- Local governments control spending and policy areas tied to daily life, including schools, public safety, transportation, housing, and water infrastructure. [2]
- Climate is local too: urban systems account for 67-72% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and local land use + transportation choices are key mitigation levers. [3][4]
Our goal: make ballots understandable and personally relevant so more people vote with confidence.
BallotGuide translates opaque ballot language into clear, source-grounded explanations about what each choice means for a voter's real life.
- Personalized, plain-English ballot annotations with citations
- Candidate and policy context grounded in real local legislation
- A budget-impact experience that shows predicted spending shifts by category
- A 3D city interface where policy markers are pinned to real places
- Built a Pinecone vector database with 30,000+ scraped embeddings from real local legislation and legal code.
- Added a Dedalus agent pipeline that queries the vector database first, then returns grounded explanations with reliable source links.
- Trained a regression model on budget data to predict category deltas that drive the interactive pie chart experience.
- Integrated real 3D city models and used our agent + geo metadata to drop location-based policy annotations directly on the map.
- React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, shadcn/ui
- Pinecone vector search
- Dedalus agent orchestration
- Three.js for 3D city visualization
npm install
npm run dev[1] Who Votes for Mayor? (Portland State University): https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1007&context=publicservice_pub
[2] U.S. Census Bureau, Government Finances (state and local functional spending): https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/gov-finances.html
[3] IPCC AR6 WGIII, Chapter 8 (Urban Systems): https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/chapter/chapter-8/
[4] U.S. EPA, Smart Growth and Transportation (local planning and emissions): https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/smart-growth-and-transportation