Why we built Voter Guide Commons
If someone asks an AI assistant where the candidates on their ballot stand, the best source is a local newsroom's voter guide, where the candidates answered the newsroom's questions themselves. We built this so that's the answer they get, with credit to the newsroom that did the work.
Who's behind it
Voter Guide Commons is a project of Hacks/Hackers, a nonprofit founded in 2009 that brings journalists and technologists together.
How it's built
It's an MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is how assistants like Claude and ChatGPT connect to outside tools and data. The server reads each participating guide, finds the passages that answer a question and hands them to the assistant along with the newsroom's name and a link.
Each newsroom's agreement is recorded in the code, and a guide is served only as far as its newsroom has agreed to.
Privacy
This site sets no cookies and runs no tracking scripts. We count page views on our own server.
When someone gives the connector a street address to find their races, the address goes to the U.S. Census geocoder to look up districts. We don't log it.
Get in touch
Newsrooms can reach us through the signup form, which has room for questions. For anything else, you can find Hacks/Hackers at hackshackers.com.