In the run‑up to the 2024 Belgian and European elections, voters were faced with more than 800 pages of dense party manifestos in Dutch, French, and English. Young and first‑time voters in particular felt overwhelmed: 7‑in‑10 said they relied on headlines or social media snippets rather than primary sources, and educators lacked an easy way to bring the real texts into the classroom. The information gap left plenty of room for misquotes, cherry‑picking, and straight‑up disinformation.
Election ProgramBot is a retrieval‑augmented chatbot that lets anyone chat with any party manifesto and get a plain‑language answer that is fully footnoted to the original PDF. Users can flip languages on the fly, compare parties side‑by‑side, and export citations for essays or news stories.
We built a multilingual, source-backed chatbot that let voters chat directly with every party’s manifesto. By combining retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), transparency logs, and youth-focused channels like WhatsApp and Instagram, we made complex political content accessible, verifiable, and engaging—especially for first-time voters and classrooms.
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The Election ProgramBot answered over 30,000 voter questions and attracted hundreds of registered political candidates who used the tool to compare and clarify positions. The project earned national media coverage and demonstrated strong demand for transparent, accessible political information ahead of the elections.
