A new tool hopes to drive more students to the polls, and it uses AI under the hood to help.
The rise of generative AI has already threatened democracy in a variety of ways, from deep fakes of high-profile figures like President Biden to personalized attacks on local figures like high school principals. But is it possible to harness AI to support rather than undermine democratic elections?
The How To Vote Flowchart generator created for Learning With AI aims to do just that. The app draws a custom flowchart to help your students decide when and where to vote. The goal is to drive student turnout by making it 100% obvious to US college students how to get to a poll for the 2024 national election on November 5th.
Students already overwhelmed with classes or extracurriculars may be confused about whether to vote on- or off-campus, to appear in person or by absentee ballot, or to bring a college or national id to the polls. Few college faculty would deny that encouraging young people to vote is a civic priority, yet the response of most universities–collecting a giant list of resources on a website or Google Doc–may just end up adding to their information overload. To fit voting into their schedules, some students just need a simple way to decide where and when to do it.
The app asks the user to complete a handful of fields and then generates the code for a decision tree; pasting that snippet into the MermaidJS editor draws a flowchart that teachers can distribute in class or online.
The app does not pretend to have advice for every scenario, since possible options will depend on timing and location; for example, in some states it may be too late for students to request absentee ballots. Instead the responsibility is on the user to assess the available options beforehand, and then use this tool to present them to students as concisely as possible. And as with any AI output, users should check the results for accuracy before sharing.
Although the app links to the bipartisan Ballotpedia site to help students learn about candidates and referenda on their ballots, the project is unaffiliated with any political party.
The How To Vote Flowchart generator uses John Swope’s open-source AI MicroApp framework to send a custom prompt to OpenAI and/or other services; Still Water Senior Researcher John Bell contributed to the project’s concept. For questions or feedback on the tool, please contact Jon Ippolito.