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Reimagining Civic Participation: The Digital Democracy Project
264 Plays1 hour ago
I talk with Ramon Perez, Executive Director of the Digital Democracy Project this week. DDP is a nonpartisan nonprofit using secure mobile voting technology to give citizens a real-time voice in legislation. Ramon explains how the platform lets verified, registered voters weigh in on bills being debated in Congress and their state house—and then scores legislators on how closely their votes match what their districts wanted. We dig into how AI, including a RAG-powered chatbot called VoteBot, helps everyday citizens parse thousands of pages of complex legislative text. We also discuss digital security, participatory budgeting, and Ramon’s ambitious goal of expanding the platform to all 50 state legislatures by 2027.
Keywords: digital democracy, mobile voting, civic tech, legislative transparency, AI in government, Ramon Perez, Digital Democracy Project, VoteBot, participatory budgeting, voter engagement, legislator accountability, PolicyViz podcast, civic engagement, govtech
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Email: jon@policyviz.com
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Biz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. And once again, I've got a great guest on this week's episode of the show. I am joined by Ramon Perez, the executive director of the Digital Democracy Project, whose goal it is to boost...
Overview of the Digital Democracy Project
00:00:28
Speaker
voter power and accountability by enabling citizens to vote on real legislative bills in the Votes app. So what they are doing is empowering people to vote, not just at you know every other year or every six years or every four years on election, but to essentially vote on bills and laws that are being currently discussed and debated in Congress and in their local city councils or state legislatures. And so it's a really interesting idea to empower voters to actually have give feedback to their elected representatives, essentially in real time, right? To let people vote on bills that their representatives are voting on and debating.
Impact of Data and Technology on Elections
00:01:10
Speaker
So we talk about what the Digital Democracy Project is doing, the technology barriers and the basic discussion or the basic questions about elections and voting in the United States in 2026. So it's a really interesting conversation this week, really focusing more on data and technology, a little bit less on data visualization though, Ramon and I do talk a little bit about the communication of the results, but we're really focusing on data collection here. Something that of course is important to all of us who are working in the data and data visualization fields. Because if we're not looking at data, if we're not thinking about the quality of the data that you're using, what is the point? Okay, so that's all I've got. I'm going to get you over to the interview now. Here's my discussion with Ramon Perez from the Digital Democracy Project, only on the PolicyViz podcast.
Ramon Perez's Background and Project Goals
00:02:00
Speaker
Hello, Ramon. Welcome to the show. Good to meet you. Yeah, good to meet you as well. Thank you, John. I appreciate being on. um Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about your work. We've already been chatting a lot ah before before we get out about AI, so we've got a lot to talk about. um But why don't we start with with introductions? Maybe you can talk a little bit about yourself and your background and and you know get us into the digital democracy project.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I'm Ramon Perez. I'm the executive director of the Digital Democracy Project, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization.
Mechanics of Advisory Voting
00:02:32
Speaker
We use mobile voting software, which has been used by um for military voters overseas to cast a secure absentee ballot on their phones.
00:02:42
Speaker
but we're using it for a different purpose. We're not asking people to vote in an election. We're asking people to tell their legislators how they want them to vote on every bill that's being debated in Congress or in their state house.
00:02:54
Speaker
And then we provide those results in real time so that legislators know what their districts want them to do. And at the end of the legislative session, we compare what do the voters want in the app to what do the legislators do on the floor in the legislative chambers And give every one of them a score like a like a baseball card that shows how often do they match their district. So the concept is very simple. It's vote, tally, score.
00:03:20
Speaker
You vote on the same bills as your legislators. We tally up in aggregate results and show them on the website as they're coming in. And then we score the legislators against what do the districts want.
00:03:32
Speaker
ah The key thing that makes it possible, as I mentioned, is that mobile voting software.
Votes App Implementation and International Reach
00:03:36
Speaker
We partnered with a company called Votes, which is V-O-A-T-Z, based out of Boston. And they've been building this election software now for about 10 years and had about 5 million votes cast in about 150 different elections. And these are binding elections. And several states now are doing this. They've all, a lot of the states who have piloted this, and red and blue states, mind you. So I think they started in West Virginia.
00:04:02
Speaker
but have worked in Utah, Arizona, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts. I think some Pennsylvania. I can't remember a variety of states. And, oh ah Denver did did want a municipal.
00:04:15
Speaker
um Now, I think that the government of Mexico in the last national election allowed all Mexican citizens outside the country to just vote from their phone using the votes app.
00:04:27
Speaker
So in Canada, in Ontario, the the the Ontario provincial government said that for municipal elections, anybody can vote from the from their phone. So now a bunch of cities have been allowing people to vote from their phone in Ontario. So I think that the technology itself is exciting.
00:04:46
Speaker
And and as I mentioned, we're not a we're not a supervisor of elections, so we're not running a binding election, but we.
Continuous Voter Engagement Model
00:04:52
Speaker
figured, um why couldn't we use this technology to build something like the Netflix of government, where you have government on demand instead of having people go to an election once every couple of years and then sit on their hands the rest of the time, like a bump on the log, just shaking our fists at the TV.
00:05:08
Speaker
We could have a say in all of the most consequential legislation that affects our lives. So the Iran War Powers Resolution, for example, was one we carried recently.
00:05:20
Speaker
um voting on whether or not to go to war, to me, seems like the most consequential reason to ask voters what they what they want to do. and And also, I think the key is to hold legislators to account for the results. I think that's that's the main thing that we're doing that is that is different from just sending your congressman an email or calling the switchboard, is that there's transparency in saying, you know,
00:05:45
Speaker
We verified voters against the voter file. We verified them with a photo ID that matches their face in the selfie scan. We know they're real human beings. We know they're registered in this district. Let's give them the right to have a say.
00:05:58
Speaker
And let's then compare apples to apples to say voters wanted X and the legislator vote voted Y and and hold them accountable at come election time.
Voter Participation and AI for Bill Summarization
00:06:09
Speaker
Right. So can you explain a little bit what happens with varying sample sizes? So you've got one person's district, 80% of people register on the app and another person's district, you know, three people register on the app.
00:06:25
Speaker
um How does the, the I guess, the the the the view that the public would see or the legislator, more importantly, the legislator would see, take into account the different potential sample sizes?
00:06:38
Speaker
Yeah, well, we take We are not a polling agency, so we're not trying to find and so and selectively sample a likely voter group, if you will.
00:06:49
Speaker
Our goal is to provide a platform so everybody can participate as they choose. And we do just report out the numbers. So if there are very few people in a given district who have voted, that is visible on the scorecard so that you get some sense of, okay, what's the what's the magnitude of user input that we've gotten here? um There are lots of ways that that, I mean, I think you're the the policy you know visualization expert. I think there are a lot of ways that you could probably help us make better visuals that can take advantage of this data. But our our goal is is radical transparency. We wanna provide all the data.
00:07:24
Speaker
We wanna let people make their own minds up. It's not as if we are saying we're going to sample from these people's opinions, and we're going to elevate their opinions and and suppress these opinions in order to get something that looks like what we call likely voters. We're not doing that. The other thing, too, is that we're asking people about bills. We're not asking about a horse race. You know, would you vote for, you know, Harris or Trump type of thing that a typical polling company does?
00:07:49
Speaker
We're saying, Do you, if you, you know, having read this ah Homeland Security funding bill, do you think that this is something that that should be passed? Yes or no?
00:08:03
Speaker
And some people are going to be very interested in that Homeland Security funding bill and other people will not care one iota. but So you're going to find that John, you might be, you might care quite a lot about healthcare policy and I might care quite a lot about taxes.
00:08:21
Speaker
But but you may only interact on a health care bill and ignore all the rest of them. And I may only care about a tax bill and ignore all the rest. You have some people who are super users who are wanting to go and want to vote on every single thing. We have those folks.
00:08:35
Speaker
Every bill we load, they will go in and they'll read about it and they'll vote on it, which is which is awesome. um So we our goal is to provide a platform and scale the platform rather than trying to find the perfect set of people that can represent opinions ah like a typical polling company would do.
00:08:54
Speaker
Right. So let me ask on the, on the, on the piece you just mentioned about the bill, do you, or have you thought about trying to generate some sort of summary? I mean, these bills, I mean, the budget bill, for example, is tens of thousands of pages. Um, have, does the tool, or have you thought about trying to provide people with a summary of what's in there?
00:09:16
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's great. I'm glad you asked that because that's another key, um, technological development, which makes this project possible, which is AI. ah Because we started this, we started the project in, we've started going into beta testing in 2022 and did our first live legislative session was a Florida legislative session, 2023. And in that time, what I did was I hired a Democrat and a Republican who were legislative policy analysts who had worked on Capitol Hill in Tallahassee.
00:09:49
Speaker
And they would just read the bills and work together on a summary that we could agree would be nonpartisan, but factually accurate. Yeah. Um, that was very time consuming. You're talking thousands of pages.
00:10:01
Speaker
So we couldn't carry that many bills. We only could carry really the high, the marquee legislation. And later on that year, I want to say it was,
00:10:12
Speaker
um chat GPT or not just chat GPT, but the ability to upload programmatically a document to the open API and get back a summary was groundbreaking. I mean, that that happened that fall, I want to say we introduced that very quickly. And we've been my my day job, I work in in AI and machine learning.
00:10:33
Speaker
and have done for the last 12 years. So I am a big believer in using these tools everywhere within the stack. and But one of the the main important things for us was summarizing complex legalese in a easily digestible, human readable form, right? Because bills are not written for us. They are written by lawyers or other lawyers who are going to defend it in front of some judge someday.
00:10:56
Speaker
And so they have to be incredibly pedantic in the way that they're written. So that makes them and very, very difficult to interpret oftentimes. And small changes in language can have a big impact on on the law.
00:11:10
Speaker
So ah AI has given us the incredible ability to let people know what is in the discussion, what's in the debate here, what's being considered in their names by their legislators.
00:11:24
Speaker
So if you if you look on our website now on digitaldemocracyproject.org, If you're looking at any given bill, you'll see this little chat bot in the bottom right, which we call VoteBot. VoteBot has been has been fed all of the legislative text from thousands of bills into a vector database and in Pinecone.
00:11:43
Speaker
And then it runs a rag query against it. So we can talk about AI if you're if you're interested in that kind of stuff. But but it it can basically rapidly read the the text in response to a user's question and and provide some really detailed answers because it's got the the full body of the text available to it, which is something you don't actually typically get from ah just the regular ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude search.
00:12:11
Speaker
Because they don't they don't pre process the entire bill. I mean, it's a lot of it's a lot in there. And you have to maintain versions because the bill gets amended. You have to update with amendments as those come through. And that can happen.
00:12:25
Speaker
pretty much every day during a legislative session. Then once the session's over, that bill is never getting touched again. So it's it's it's dead or it became law. um So it's a lot of documents to manage. management and And we do that as part of our work because it's not just for Digital Democracy Project,
00:12:42
Speaker
As you rightly point out, John, it's not just about being able to have a say in what mobile voting gets you in a secure mechanism for reaching out to your elected official.
Exploring Participatory Budgeting
00:12:51
Speaker
It's being able to understand. It's being able to educate yourself on the policies and to the level at where you have enough comfort to have a say.
00:13:00
Speaker
Because a lot of times what people will will say to me is, well, you know, we ah we elect these politicians to speak on our behalf because I don't know as much as they do. Right. They're supposed to go to Capitol Hill and they have a team and they understand all these bills and they have a fine grain level of detail and can make an educated decision.
00:13:19
Speaker
And usually what I'll say is like, you haven't spent much time with these guys. I think what you find is that their budgets have actually been cut so much over the last 30 years that oftentimes they're sharing staff, even especially the state house level. And I've spent a lot of time in Tallahassee um watching legislators from both sides of the aisle go through the motions, some juniors, some seniors, some house leadership, et cetera.
00:13:46
Speaker
Same in DC. You know, what you find is A junior um congressman in Washington is expected to spend 70 to 80 percent of their time dialing for dollars. They if they show up for a vote, the vote is going to be a party line vote.
00:14:01
Speaker
They're going to vote the way the House leadership and the whips office tells them to vote. Oftentimes they rarely ever read the bills because their job is to go raise money for the party. It is not to understand policy at a deep level.
00:14:14
Speaker
And Washington is is much worse in this sense because um that at least in in the state legislatures, they tend to follow regular order and still have time for debate and committee hearings and whatnot.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah. in In D.C., you know, they will they'll they'll roll out major policy at the 11th hour and have a vote around until two o'clock in the morning. Nobody can be expected to read the one big, beautiful bill in the 12 hours that they've had to look at. right I mean, it's it's not realistic.
00:14:42
Speaker
So do you pull for bills that are modifying existing law? Do you also pull in the existing law? So for example, you can see bills that say, you know, this is modifying line 17 of blah, blah, blah, to say from group X to group Y. So you have all the current votes. Does it also look back at the existing law?
00:15:06
Speaker
That is actually a very insightful question. So I would say not directly. We don't pull existing law into the vector database for VoteBot. what The way legislation is marked up, they'll usually annotate when something changes existing law, yeah but they but they don't necessarily say...
00:15:27
Speaker
ah basically they'll say, you know, this highlighted section is a change to law XYZ, right? Yeah. But it doesn't, it's not the entire law. It's just saying this section changed or this line changed, right?
00:15:37
Speaker
So I do think that would be a really fascinating additional feature for us to build. And I would be, I've always had in my head where it would be great if we could mark up exactly what changed and and and show that in a visual way so that people can say, this is what changed and this is how it affects either existing law or this is brand new law. We surface what Congress gives us, but I know that there are way better ways to visualize what Congress gives other than they're just doing like a green line through.
00:16:08
Speaker
yeah or a red markup or ah like a strikethrough, which is not you know easy to necessarily interpret. So I think that would be ah that's actually a great idea for for additional feature development. Yeah. ah the The last question I want to ask on on on this topic is, as someone who used to work at the Congressional Budget Office, do you bring in the budget numbers as well? And and and I'm going to layer on one other question here.
00:16:34
Speaker
Have you tried to look at what people who are using the app are looking at? So I'm combining these questions because I'm curious what you think people using the app are most interested in when they're reading the bill, as opposed to, i'm sure there are many that are like,
00:16:52
Speaker
I mean, just like just like legislators, right? Like I'm for this, I'm against this wholesale. I don't need to read the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But for those who want to go a little bit deeper, like what are they, where are they looking? What what is the thing that that they're finding? And then of course the budget numbers as well. So a lot of questions.
00:17:10
Speaker
No, that's great. For one, John, I didn't realize you were at the CBO because I was actually i actually interned at the CBO in 2014 as a Georgetown econ grad student. So okay so maybe maybe our paths crossed at some point.
00:17:24
Speaker
I think Doug Elmendorf was the head of the CBO at the time. yeah yeah Oh, that's very cool. So yes, I have always wanted to do something with the budget. And really what I would like to do is participatory budgeting.
00:17:38
Speaker
where So the budget documents, we have not... generally what we do is we say, okay, the budget, we'll bring it in and and people are are voting up or down. Do you agree passing this legislation where the legislation is the budget? Do you agree with that? Yes or no, all right?
00:17:55
Speaker
But really what you want is to get to the real power, I think, of the technology would be allowing so a lot of levels of nuance. where rather than just a straight up or down vote from people, if we could use participatory budgeting where we could say, okay, given this bucket of money for DHS, for example, how would you prioritize it? Like, don't let's not, there's a thousand line items. So we can't expect people to read every one and say, I agree with that line item, but more so if you had a hundred dollars to spend on the department of Homeland security,
00:18:26
Speaker
What would be the ways that you would assign the money? Okay, you take 17 of those dollars and you put it towards like border security. Or maybe you take five of those dollars and you put it towards the FAA. Maybe you take you know one of those dollars and you put it towards customs.
00:18:40
Speaker
I don't know, whatever it is. And that would be really interesting because then over a broad swath of people, you could actually then... um aggregate enough information to get a crowdsourced sort of steer on what people's priorities are for for spending. I think that would be really, really fascinating.
00:19:00
Speaker
And And the mobile voting, the votes app that we're using, um it it we would have to work with votes to build out that part, like what I have in mind.
00:19:12
Speaker
<unk>ip They could do participatory budgeting. They have rank choice voting and advisory voting built in. So you could do kind of a, You could kind of do a hacky way of doing participatory budgeting in the form of a ranked choice vote where people just sort of rank their priorities.
00:19:26
Speaker
But it's one thing to say, okay, my number one budget spend would be border security. But that's that's different from us assigning a dollar amount, right? because Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what i mean? Like you could say, yeah i want the FAA to be funded, but the FAA is um is a small proportion of the overall spend.
00:19:44
Speaker
So even if it's your number one priority, that's different from assigning a dollar amount. So I think that I would love to do something on participatory budgeting and do it in a framework where we we still maintain all the security and and the whole blockchain backend that we're using and all the the homomorphic encryption and all that kind of stuff, because there are participatory budgeting tools that exists on the internet, but nothing that combines the the the security of mobile voting. So yeah, but I would love that.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's very cool. I mean, I could see, yeah, lots of paths forward into lots of these other platforms other data sets and piece of information to pull in, pull them together. um
Ensuring Digital Security and Trust
00:20:22
Speaker
Okay. So um ah one of the, I laugh a little bit, but it's, it's actually quite not, not funny, but one of the things that we've obviously had to discuss in the last Six years is voter fraud in in quotation marks. And we know, I think everybody listening to this podcast knows all these, so I'm not going to rehash all that. We know about the Dominion voting. We know about general critiques of of digital and mail-in voting now, which of course is part of the SAVE Act that will get rid of a lot mail-in voting. So your your project is not actually elections, so we're not there. But I'm just curious about...
00:21:05
Speaker
how you think about or how how DDP thinks about digital security, voting, election sort of just generally like. yeah yeah and And does the project try to maybe yeah like an underlying effect of this kind of ease people's concerns that we can use modern technology to do what we've been doing for 200 some odd years in this country?
00:21:27
Speaker
ah Yeah, yeah, i think I think you ask some important questions questions to this, right? It's because we could do digital democracy project just in a regular web app.
00:21:39
Speaker
Like we could, you know, And there are other tools out there that allow people to have a say on on legislation. And then, you know, you click a button, do you support this bill? And then it sends an email to your congressman. Like those tools exist, right? Why do we spend so much money and time and energy trying to integrate this this much more complex stack?
00:22:00
Speaker
um And it's because my feeling has always been that the the goal is to tell legislators how to vote and provide them that information before they walk into the chambers and actually cast a vote in Congress. And the only way they're going to listen to that is that they have high confidence that these are real human beings.
00:22:23
Speaker
They are registered to vote and they live in my district. So they're U.S. citizens. We can match their, you know, we've we've we've done all the front end verification of IDs and documents and,
00:22:35
Speaker
So that's why i have all i've i have never personally understood this concern about voter ID. In fact, from the latest latest polling, I've seen even a majority of Democrats and something like 80% of Americans overall believe that you should have an ID when it's time to vote.
00:22:50
Speaker
Because you do need to prove who you are. I mean, you know, so and for our system, it is, we we simply could not go without ID verification. Nobody would trust the results. If anybody could create an account using grandma's, you know, name and zip code and date of birth from the voter file. So we have to we we so We have to spend a lot of money to to to build a system or rely on a lot of the money that that VOTES has spent also to build a system that and incorporates a zero trust framework and homomorphic encryption and protects the secret ballot, which is another important thing. And and still provides real-time aggregated vote results in a way that matters for what we're doing. So um I think security is the number one responsibility. I think I'll often tell the team here that we're not trying to build...
00:23:47
Speaker
a product, we're trying to build trust. We're a community project. This is a team of unpaid volunteers, developers, legislative analysts, organizers, you know, you know volunteer, people volunteering to to table at an event or knock on doors or make phone calls. We have to build a project that the American people and our elected representatives will trust.
00:24:13
Speaker
And that means they have to believe From soup to nuts, they have to believe that we're not putting shareholders in the way of any decision we make. We're in a nonprofit organization.
00:24:25
Speaker
We are that way we know, you know, there's nobody with their thumb on the scales trying to manipulate the results. We have ah partnered with a company that has been state ramp certified in several states.
00:24:37
Speaker
and and gone through tons of security audits. um We can't actually see how people vote. It's a secret ballot. So I can't say. All I know is that, you know, John Schwabish verified with a photo ID and is registered but to vote in, i don't know, Virginia, right? of Yeah.
00:24:54
Speaker
but and But I can't see that you voted in favor of the the Iran War Powers resolution and I voted against it. We we can't see that because it's a secret ballot. And that's exactly the way we we like it. Right. We have to protect people's privacy while still verifying security. So so many of the things that we've done, which feel like ah handcuffs sometimes when people come to us and say,
00:25:18
Speaker
well, why is it that you can't give me some specialized report on how this demographic supports this legislation or whatever? And I say, I'm sorry. like that's That's a policy choice by design because we're not here to make money.
00:25:31
Speaker
we're not we We are here to to try to build a better version of democracy that is more accountable and more transparent for the American people. So yeah, I do agree with you that we've we've sort of lowered the heat a bit on mobile voting because this isn't a binding election.
00:25:50
Speaker
So we're not the supervisor of elections office. So right we're providing advisory voting to legislators. But I happen to also believe that as people use the technology, become more comfortable with it, they're going say, gosh, well, like why? This is so easy.
00:26:05
Speaker
I can sit here on my couch with my cup of coffee and I can read about some complicated policy and I've got this AI bot that's telling me all the details about whether or not the FAA gets funded or not. And what's the, you know, why shouldn't I be able to vote like that? Like, why do I have to go into the poor voters of California this year are going to walk into a polling booth?
00:26:26
Speaker
Well, actually they do absentee vote by mail, but they're going to have something like 30 ballot initiatives on their ballot. Hmm. How great would that be if you had a little chat bot that had read those ballot initiatives for you and can help you understand the fine details of the implications of every one of those proposed constitutional amendments or citizen proposed amendments? um Several states have...
00:26:51
Speaker
ballot initiatives i think arizona is is has got potentially 30 or 40 that could end up they might end up setting a record this year possibly on the number of of and they do they do in-person voting right so you've got to physically go to a polling location have a line of people standing behind you and now you're reading about some bond issuance or some constitutional amendment that you're seeing for the first time i mean it's a lot of cognitive load for people so that's why they typically know who's at the top of the ticket But judges, city councilmen, you know state reps, a lot of that gets left blank or they just vote party lines.
00:27:25
Speaker
So really, though that's part of the problem we're trying to solve. And I think when the paper ballots go away, you actually find that you can have a much better, more comfortable voting experience where people feel like they had the opportunity to educate themselves in the comfort of their own homes before they make pretty important decision.
Legislative Scorecards and Upcoming Elections
00:27:45
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So we're recording this in in mid-April. A lot of the filing deadlines for the November elections are around this time, depending on state, you know usually April 1, May 1, June 1.
00:27:59
Speaker
I'm guessing you're seeing sort of an uptick in interest. Are there other things that you're thinking about trying to bring into the tool leading up to the November midterms?
00:28:13
Speaker
Right. The main thing that we want to do is as. OK, so this year was the first year we've expanded to additional state legislature. So we all Americans in all 50 states, if you're registered to vote in any state, you can vote on federal bills right now. But this year was the first year we incorporated state legislation in additional states, including Virginia, Washington, Utah, Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Michigan. And so those legislative sessions are about to come to an end.
00:28:43
Speaker
And so we will then produce the scorecards where we match the legislators, what they did in the session to compare to what people wanted in the app. So a lot of our main priority in prepping for election season is to provide people the best data we can provide them on how did their legislators vote and what did their districts want um in the app compared to how their legislators voted. So they've got some concrete data to work with when they go to cast a ballot in November. I think that's our primary mission.
00:29:14
Speaker
Inform people in a factually accurate, concrete way. Is the person who currently represents your district doing their basic job, which is go to Washington or go to your state capital and represent that district. what What did the district want and what did that person do?
00:29:33
Speaker
That is our mission and that's what we'd be focused on as we ramp up for election season. Great. With the last few minutes we have left, we've talked a lot about like additional things you could do, um but looking past November into the next year, five, 10 years,
00:29:49
Speaker
What are you thinking about? or What are you hoping the Digital Democracy Project can accomplish? and And what features can you add? And like, what is that five, 10-year plan?
00:30:01
Speaker
You know, I think... It's double-edged sword with this technology because the technology unlocks like infinite possibilities. So i have to I have to try not to let my mind wander into every single thing that we can build. Because it really, i think that's so exciting.
00:30:17
Speaker
We are really right now, at have we have the ability to completely reimagine what American democracy looks like. And there's a whole group of reformers and builders out there doing this kind of thing, but concretely for digital democracy project, our ambition is to get all 50 state legislatures into our system. So you, so any American can vote on any state level legislation in 2027. So that is our, that is our goal. We currently have seven States. We want to be at 50 States. That's very ambitious.
00:30:47
Speaker
Um, definitely members of my team who are saying that's going to be too much too fast. But I actually think this is what's kind of exciting is that like I am, I have been leaning in really with Claude Code and Code Generation. I was using Codex last year, but Claude Code is truly a game changer this year.
00:31:05
Speaker
And we're, I think we're going to be able to push so much faster than we could have before. And trying to get to all 50 states to me seems more doable now like this, like in 2026 than it did. If you would ask me even the last couple months of 2025, I mean, that's the, like the blinding speed of development is really remarkable. And it's going to allow us to build really cool features much, much faster. So getting to all 50 states.
00:31:34
Speaker
And then after that, um, I have a goal and we've always had it in our heads that we want to be at the local level. We want people to be able to weigh in on what's happening in their city council, what's happening in their county board, what's happening in their school board. You know, some sort of rezoning goes on where your kid is now going to be put into a different school. And a lot of people are finding out about that after the fact, because if you're not ah able to attend the school board meetings at, you know, two o'clock on a Tuesday, you don't really hear about all the debate, but,
00:32:06
Speaker
We have the tools now to bring the debate directly into people's hands. in ah in an app on their phone. And so that's where I wanna be um in the in the out years, you know after we get to all 50 state legislatures, but getting the data, you know you're a data guy, John. when when you we were We heavily lean on OpenStage, which is a project that has been scraping the vote records of every legislator at the from Congress and and all 50 states.
00:32:34
Speaker
And they do incredible work of, pulling recent copies of the bills, all the amendments, and then how did every legislator vote on every bill, which is not easy work. It's a lot of data scraping of very complex, messy data on state government websites.
00:32:50
Speaker
To try to get down to the local level is just infinitely harder. You go from 50 states to 10,000 municipalities, 3,000 school boards. it's ah it's It's a challenge, but I happen to think that AI-generated browser um automation And Claude Code is going to is going to open up the possibility for us to do local level um data collection of how did every city councilman in Walla Walla, Washington vote on a particular housing bill or something like that. I think i think we can get there because of what AI gives us.
00:33:26
Speaker
Wow. Yeah, that's great. um Okay. So folks have listened to this. They're really interested. Where can they find
How to Access and Participate in the Project
00:33:33
Speaker
you? Where can they find the tool? Where can they get the app? You can visit us at digitaldemocracyproject.org. Our partners are VOTES, V-O-A-T-Z. You can go to VOTES.com.
00:33:43
Speaker
ah You can download the VOTES app. And our partnership with VOTES is that anybody who downloads the app gets to see Bill's populating in in the app. So if you download the votes app and you go through the voter verification with a photo ID and you're on the voter file, we can find you on the voter file.
00:34:00
Speaker
ah You'll see legislation start to populate. If you are in one of the seven states where we have state legislation, you'll see federal and state. If you're not in one of those seven states, you'll see federal bills, but you'll see, you'll have something you can participate on right away. So you can download the votes app.
00:34:15
Speaker
You can go to digitaldemocracyproject.org and you can see the maps where we show congressional districts and how people are voting. And you can also talk to our chat bot on there and get really detailed questions answered about policy.
00:34:29
Speaker
um So, yeah, give us a look. Awesome. Thanks, Ramon. Appreciate it. It was really, really interesting stuff, really interesting work. And yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, John, for having me.
00:34:39
Speaker
I appreciate it.
00:34:42
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that episode of the show. I hope you will check out the Digital Democracy Project website, also the Votes app on all the app stores, I guess. You can go check it out and download it and register, and that way you can have a little bit more power as a voter.
00:34:57
Speaker
And of course, what episode wouldn't be complete without me asking you to please rate or review the show wherever you get your podcasts, be it on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever else? And if you're feeling in that giving rating reviewing mode, please head over to Amazon or Goodreads or wherever you get your books and feel free to give one of my books a rating or review.
00:35:19
Speaker
Better visualizations, data visualizations in Excel, better presentations, whatever it is you have on your bookshelf, I of course would appreciate that rating and review. All right, so until next time, this has been the PolicyViz Podcast.
00:35:32
Speaker
Thanks so much for listening.