Ballot Briefing — Plain-English UK Candidate Explainer
An AI service that turns any cluttered UK election ballot into a one-screen brief: every candidate as a plain-English summary, a seriousness flag, and a side-by-side policy view.
UK voters facing long ballots with fringe and joke candidates who don't know where to start
- Per-candidate AI one-paragraph bio with a 'serious / fringe / joke' badge that's always visible
- Side-by-side policy comparison on the issues you care about (housing, NHS, immigration, cost of living)
- 5-question 'who's closest to your views' quiz that maps your answers onto the actual field
- Printable single-page ballot card to take to the polling station
Clacton's record-breaking 34-candidate field, with 20 independents and three Monster Raving Loony entries, has made manual candidate research impossible for voters.
Clacton July 2024 by-election is real and produced the unusual 34-candidate field cited, but the use case is event-driven and concentrated to a 2-4 week election window; could not independently verify search volume after tool failures.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheyWorkForYou ↗
TheyWorkForYou (mySociety, since 2004) plus the wider mySociety suite (WhoCanIVotefor, Votematch partnerships) already cover accessible UK candidate/MP info, adopted by Channel 4 in elections and even referenced in Parliament.TheyWorkForYou - Wikipedia ↗
UK candidate-information market is explicitly non-commercial: TheyWorkForYou is free, scrapes official sources, and was praised by MPs in Parliament; willingness-to-pay for voter info is structurally low against free BBC, Electoral Commission and mySociety offerings.TheyWorkForYou - Wikipedia ↗
General elections are ~4-5 years apart and by-elections sporadic; the product is dormant between cycles, making subscription/retention economics very weak.
Underlying data (candidate lists, manifestos, Hansard, Register of Interests) is already public and well-structured; AI summarisation is commodity, so MVP build is straightforward.