# Liber Populus

## Vote like your life depends on it.

By many accounts, this upcoming 2020 election will be one of the most contentious to date. With a global pandemic,
economic crisis, racial unrest, two starkly different candidates, and a polarized nation, it is important that everyone who is able to partakes in the democratic process at the heart of the American story.

This is where **Liber Populus** comes in.

**Liber Populus** – Latin for *“free people”*

**Liber Populus** provides an assortment of tools and information to equip every voter with what they need to ensure they register and cast their ballot while avoiding obstacles such as voter suppression, ballot filing mistakes, and more!
## Inspiration

##### In the sphere of Awareness, we wanted to design an innovative way to make the diffusion and sharing of political information more accurate, transparent, and accessible through technology.

Common news sources implement ranking systems that create an echo chamber for opinions and even misinformation. We designed Citizen X to not only inform citizens about their representatives but also to engage them, foster discussions, and inspire them to expand their knowledge about their political climates by connecting them to further resources.

## What it does

##### Citizen X is building the next generation of informed citizens.

Our iOS app allows users to use their voice to ask about representatives on different scopes of focus, such as their local, state, and national legislators. Users can even learn about representatives in locations other than their own and be guided to sites and social media outlets where they can learn more. Citizen X is an information funnel that doesn't optimize for views or impressions; it tells the people what you want to know.

## How we built it

##### Citizen X uses SoundHound's Houndify SDK and Phone2Action's Legislator Web API.

Citizen X uses technology to ease the process of diffusion while encouraging users to stay engaged through an interactive user experience. Through voice interactions with SoundHound, users enage and tell Citizen X what they want to learn about: many or a single legislator(s) as well as their area of interest. Citizen X uses this information to query Phone2Action's Legislator API to retrieve trusted overview information about representatives. Citizen X was built with Xcode in Swift for iOS 12.

## Challenges we ran into

##### Unfamiliar SDK and Web API territory + a complex view hierarchy.

Using the SDKs proved challenging at first, especially with regards to analyzing the phrases spoken to SoundHound as well as the parsing of the JSON retrieved from Phone2Action. Equally as difficult was building this information into a user interface that kept users encouraged, focused, and informed. We spent much of our time refining the stacking card layout, tuning the interface, and supporting the voice interaction history.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

##### Citizen X improves people's political awareness in an unbiased and self-driven manner.

We love how Citizen X makes the user feel. Users feel like they're having a conversation about politics in order to better themselves. Additionally, because Citizen X links users to trusted sites of information such as Vote Smart and the Center for Responsive Politics, we've given citizens a way to learn without being subjected to algorithmic recommendations. People can start by learning about the representatives within their communities and then expand their scope of interest up to their state and nation.

## What we learned

##### Experience, experience, experience.

We learned how to present meaningful information and engage users in ways we had never had experience with before: voice chatting. Additionally, we gained lots of experience using an unfamiliar Web API and validating data and images retrieved from the web. Building the complex card stack layout put our UIKit knowledge to the test as well as our ability to create a fluid and memory-efficient interface.

## What's next for Citizen X

##### Support more advanced queries & ship Citizen X

We hope to future-proof the use of our voice chat API so that we can share Citizen X with the world. Alongside this, we hope to support more complex voice interactions and make different types of queries and information cards available.
Our full case study, including our user research and ideation process can be read here:
<https://medium.com/@annakambhampaty/pocket-democracy-empowering-voters-using-the-google-cloud-vision-api-ibm-watson-and-revspeech-61268791fcd3>

## Inspiration

"If I don't know either candidate in the race, I'd go by picking the Democrat over the Republican, then women over men, then names that sound like they come from like some kind of racial minority or something, then from there we're just straight up guessing."

Over 30% of voters fail to complete their ballots every year. Political scientists attribute this to an absence in information which causes the SAT effect- if you don't know, don't answer it. Even more, researchers have found that candidates listed first on the ballot can receive up to 5% more votes. When they don't have the information they need, candidates' names, ethnicity, and gender can affect voters make decisions. The above quote from a voter we interviewed vividly illustrates this fact.

There are several issues surrounding voter engagement, voter registration, and disenfranchisement policy, but, for the scope of this project, we focus on the specific interaction of the registered voter filling out their ballot. We ask, how might we help a voter make a more informed, more personal decision at the booth?

Through interviewing users on the day of the hackathon and going off past observations of this issue, yesterday, we ideated and came up with the following solution that utilizes a wide range of technologies.

## What it does

Our solution is an augmented reality experience that allows a user to scan their smart phone over their ballot. Our app, Pocket Democracy, will pick up the names on the ballot and allow the user to click them to reveal relevant information, popular news links, and a sentiment analysis of articles relating to the candidate. Pocket Democracy also supports speech-to-text and text-to-speech recognition processing.

## How we built it

We developed a web app that first processes an image of the ballot using Google Cloud Vision's Optical Character Recognition API to detect and then extract the text from the image of the ballot. We grab the candidate names in text-form and pass them in queries to IBM Watson's Discovery News API. We use this API to scrape the web and gather the relevant information on the candidate- stances on prominent policy issues, relevant news links, and a sentiment analysis of news articles. We also utilize RevSpeech's API to implement a speech to text feature, for accessibility reasons. A user can say a name into the app, and it will pull up the same relevant information on the candidate. The app also has the ability, thanks to Google Cloud's text to speech, to speak the relevant information it scraped back to the user. Beyond just accessibility, this also makes it so that the user does not need to be in front of a ballot and can get informed prior, as well.

## What's next for Pocket Democracy

Before moving forward with our project, extensive research in information ethics and user testing for accessibility and usability will be required. Then, we can iterate on our design in an informed manner to make it as accessible and equitable as possible. Algorithmic and news source bias should also be addressed in the future. We'd like to implement a personalization feature as well as a simple text input . We also need to more smoothly connect the varying components of our project. A reminder of our original mission- to help the voter make an informed decision with ease for themselves!