When voters ask AI about the ballot, the answers should come from local newsrooms
Voter Guide Commons is a connector that lets AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT answer election questions from voter guides that local newsrooms reported and published. Every answer names the newsroom and links back to its guide.
The newsroom's guide does the talking
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A voter asks
Someone asks their assistant who is running for state assembly in their district, or where the candidates for governor stand on child care.
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The assistant checks the guides
It looks the question up in the voter guides newsrooms have chosen to share. Give it a street address and it works out the voter's districts first.
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The newsroom gets the credit
The assistant gets the guide's text as published, with the newsroom's name and a link to the guide, so the voter can see where the answer came from.
It says when it doesn't know
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No guide, no guess
If no participating guide covers a race, the connector says so plainly. A county board seat, or a state where no newsroom has joined yet, gets a straight "not covered" instead of an answer pieced together from somewhere else.
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The source stays checkable
The connector hands over the guide's text exactly as the newsroom published it, so anything an assistant says can be checked against the original.
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Addresses aren't logged
An address typed in to find someone's races goes to the U.S. Census geocoder to look up districts. We don't keep it.
In preview with invited testers
The connector isn't open to the public yet. We're testing it with a group of invited users before the general election.
The first guide in the commons is Wisconsin Watch's 2026 voter guide, used with Wisconsin Watch's permission.
Does your newsroom publish a voter guide?
Sign it up. You keep ownership, you choose how assistants can use it and you can pull out anytime.