What if Your Ballot Had a Text Box?
Democracy could be way more fun if, instead of ticking boxes, we just shared our ideas and LLMs helped the city make sense of it all
Imagine it’s Sunday and you head to the voting booth. But this time, there are no boxes to tick. No yes-or-no choices. Instead, you’re asked open questions.
Instead of deciding for or against a new swimming pool, you’re asked what you think of the city’s project. Instead of voting yes or no on fireworks, you’re asked how you’d like to celebrate the national holiday. And at the end, you can even share your own ideas with the city council.
For a long time, this kind of voting felt impossible — too many answers, too much complexity to process. But with today’s large language models, we could actually gather and summarize the ideas of thousands of people in a way that city councils can work with.
Democracy has always meant power to the people. Maybe the next step is a system where leaders don’t just count our votes, but listen to the full range of our voices.