Some Denver high school kids from mostly immigrant families built an AI app to help their parents and people like them vote. It makes the process easy — how to register and interpret ballot issues.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Voting in the U.S. can be complicated, especially for newly naturalized citizens whose first language isn’t English. Some high school students in Denver, many from immigrant families, are trying to help, and they harnessed the power of artificial intelligence. Experts are praising their efforts even if there is still concern about AI’s accuracy. Colorado Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin visited their classroom.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I want you to go to make a voting plan.
JENNY BRUNDIN, BYLINE: The students at DSST College View are 97% students of color – mostly Hispanic, some Vietnamese. In their civics class, after researching who votes and who doesn’t, they wanted to do a project to help people less likely to vote. Many have parents who are naturalized citizens, but they’re intimidated by the voting process. And senior Daisy Quintana says young people gravitate towards technology.
DAISY QUINTANA: We were talking about how not many people vote and they have the ability to vote. So I feel like this encouraged us to make this app that could, like, help others want to vote and vote.
BRUNDIN: The English version of Colorado’s voter guide is 122 pages this year. There is a Spanish version, but students say the technical language is confusing. It’s out of reach, especially for young people and their family members. They wanted to build a simple way to engage disenfranchised voters in multiple languages.
JUAN CRUZ-MINERO: This is where it tells you, you can start your journey right here.
BRUNDIN: Juan Cruz-Minero shows me the front page of their app, called VoteWise Colorado. Students were divided into work groups, like quality control or technical architecture. They built the app and a companion chatbot with their teacher and an industry partner from Tinman Kinetics. I start asking questions.
Am I registered to vote?
Juan types into the bot. And I am.
CRUZ-MINERO: Well, it gives us the link to GoVoteColorado.
BRUNDIN: That’s the official Colorado government site. I ask about individual ballot measures.
CRUZ-MINERO: Proposition 129 is about establishing veterinary professional associates.
BRUNDIN: The answers are clear and simple to understand. In the larger world, experts say going to one of the big chatbots for voter information is not a good idea. They can give you incorrect or biased information depending on how you phrase your question. Virginia Tech Professor Cayce Myers.
CAYCE MYERS: As we know with all things AI, there’s a real due diligence on behalf of the users to fact-check it and to verify what they’re being told.
BRUNDIN: University of Colorado computer scientist Jim Martin is concerned about chatbots oversimplifying pros and cons listed in the state voter guide.
JIM MARTIN: OpenAI decides that, well, this is a good paraphrase, to shorten it or to elaborate. And you don’t know whether or not that’s consistent with what the legislative intent was.
BRUNDIN: But Myers says it looks like the students made their app and bot responsibly with good safeguards. Student Angel Garcia.
ANGEL GARCIA: Bots like these – we’ve made them trained on what’s inside the actual documents, and I feel like it’s more of a secure way to understand what’s happening.
BRUNDIN: They used a platform called Playlab, a nonprofit that gives teachers access to large language AI models with guardrails built in. And they followed national safety principles for educators working with AI that included significant prompting and training focused on getting voters objective information from official sources. Students say they know the risks of AI, but they also see it as a way to address a problem they saw in their communities. Hector Sanchez-Ruiz.
HECTOR SANCHEZ-RUIZ: I want to connect more people, to let them know that, like, their vote really matters and that it should be heard.
BRUNDIN: After all this work, the kids are looking forward to learning election results tomorrow like everybody else. For NPR News, I’m Jenny Brundin.
(SOUNDBITE OF QUINCY JONES’ “GHANA”)
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