How we stay neutral
ThinkBallot never tells you how to vote. Neutrality isn't a promise we make — it's a property of how the system is built. Here's the whole pipeline, in plain terms.
The pipeline
1 · Official sources
State voter guide, Legislative Analyst's Office, county registrars. Aggregators only fill gaps.
2 · Ingestion
Parsers turn source documents into raw records. No AI involved at this step.
3 · Grounded AI pass
An AI rewrites the official text in plain language. It may only reorganize what's in the source — never add facts.
4 · Grounding check
Every generated sentence must trace to a source. If it can't, it's dropped and labeled "not available."
5 · Your ballot
What you read is a fast lookup over that checked dataset. No AI runs while you browse.
The rules
| Rule | What it means |
|---|---|
| Cite or omit | No sentence appears without a source you can click. Missing citation → the field is omitted with a visible note, never invented. |
| Symmetry by construction | Arguments for and against come from the official ballot arguments and get equal prominence. Every candidate gets the same fields, same length budget, same tone. |
| The AI transforms, it never authors | The model only rewrites official source text handed to it. It runs at build time — not while you browse (the one exception: signed-in Q&A, which must cite or refuse). |
| Community content is separate | Comments and community facts live in a visibly distinct zone, on separate infrastructure, and can never modify the official cards. Moderation is viewpoint-neutral. |
| Your address is never stored | It's converted to your county and districts, then discarded — even if you have an account. |
What we will never do
No endorsements. No predictions. No "how you should vote." No partisan framing in our own voice. No fabricated facts. No login required to read. These aren't policies we might revisit — they're the boundary that makes everything else trustworthy.