“A Hyperlinked Ballot Should Be Normal”
Early voting is underway for the 2026 midterms in the USA. Here in Union County, North Carolina, it runs through October 31, and Election Day is Tuesday, November 3.
If you are like many citizens of the United States, you will walk into a voting booth knowing a few names from news headlines and yard signs. Then you will reach the rest of the ballot: Judges, school board seats, soil and water supervisors, state Constitutional amendments, and then bond questions with a long paragraph of fine print. Those races shape our communities every day, and they are often the ones we know least about.
That is why I built Interactive Ballot.
What is InteractiveBallot.com?
Interactive Ballot is a free website and nonpartisan AI prompt you can use with a “frontier model” AI chatbot of your choice (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.) to turn your own official sample ballot into an interactive voter guide. Follow these 3 steps on your smartphone, tablet or computer:
- Download your sample ballot as a PDF. (Most states provide this, but not all…)
- Upload / attach your PDF in an AI chatbot interface. (I use and recommend Claude Pro, your ‘mileage’ may vary depending on the model used and if it is a free or paid version.)
- Paste in the prompt from the website, and get back a single web page that mirrors your ballot. (You can save and share that single HTML file with family and other voters in your same precinct!)
On the interactive webpage you create with these two ingredients, every candidate’s name will be linked to their OFFICIAL campaign website. When there is no campaign site, the page says so plainly and links the next best source, such as Ballotpedia or a nonpartisan voter guide, clearly labeled as third-party information. Every ballot question shows its official wording, with links to the official summary and to neutral explainers.
You can check off your picks as you go and print a one-page cheat sheet to take to the polls. Your choices are saved only in your own browser. Nothing is sent anywhere. (No surveillance tracking!)
The site includes a “finder” for all 50 U.S. states and DC to help you locate your sample ballot, plus the full prompt with a Copy button. You can see an example built from a Union County, NC ballot for this election. The first version, a year ago, was a ballot for Stallings, NC town elections.
Why a Personalized, Hyperlinked Ballot Matters
Let’s be honest: A web page and a free web tool like Interactive Ballot will not fix our political polarization problems. But it can help each of us arrive at the polls better informed about every person on our ballot, and the decisions we need to make. We need to know about more candidates and issues than large campaign donors want.
In 2026, a hyperlinked ballot should be an expectation, not a novelty. More than a decade ago, I wrote about interactive writing: digital texts that can be linked, shared, commented on, and built together. Links turn a static page into a doorway. A paper ballot is a list of names. A hyperlinked ballot can be a digital portal to learning and better citizenship.
We should use this power to strengthen our representative democracy.
A word to candidates
Interactive Ballot has a second goal: Encouraging every candidate, including those running for local offices, to use a website to tell their story.
A campaign website does not need to be fancy or expensive. A single page with your background, your experience, why you are running, and how to reach you helps voters a great deal. And yes, you should use VIDEO to tell your story. Our society in 2026 in the United States is a multimedia culture. When you build an interactive ballot, you can quickly tell which candidates understand this, and which do not. Some local candidates here in North Carolina do not have a campaign website at all. I hope that changes.
Try it, and tell me how it went
- Visit interactiveballot.com and use the state finder to get your sample ballot as a PDF.
- Copy the prompt, open your AI tool, attach your ballot, and send. I built this with Claude and recommend a paid plan, it worked perfectly for me. If you use a different or free model, hopefully it will also produce good results.
- Check the results. AI tools make mistakes, so click the links and compare everything to your official ballot.
Then please do two things. First, fill out the short feedback form on the site; it helps me improve the prompt and site. Second, share your ballot and this project with the hashtag #InteractiveBallot on Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, or LinkedIn, so neighbors who vote on the same ballot can use it too.
Interactive Ballot is nonpartisan and experimental. It is not affiliated with any candidate, campaign, political party, or election office. It does not tell anyone how to vote. The code is open on GitHub. Learn more about my (Wes Fryer’s) AI coding experiments and learning journey on ai.wesfryer.com.
Informed voters make better choices, and better conversations. Let’s make the hyperlinked ballots normal!
AI Attribution: I (Wes Fryer) used Claude AI Pro (Opus 5.5 High and Sonnet 5.5 High) to code the various versions of InteractiveBallot.com. I also used these AI models to create the included graphics, and draft this article. I added multiple edits and links to the draft. InteractiveBallot.com is the co-creation of Wes Fryer and Claude AI. 🙂 Learn more on the GitHub repo.
This article is also shared on the Heal Our Culture Substack, where you’re invited to SUBSCRIBE!
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