Know Your Vote Kentucky
A free, non-partisan civic tool that makes Kentucky state legislation searchable and readable for everyday people.
Year
2026
Scope
Product Design + Development
Client
Personal project
Duration
ongoing
Kentucky voters, activists, and newcomers want to keep up with bills in Frankfort, but we're limited to what the media chooses to cover or we have to dig through the decades-old government sites where the bill data lives. Tools like LegiScan and Open States exist, but they're not intuitive, and they're full of jargon. That leaves folks feeling confused, frustrated, and even discouraged.
Challenge
Digitization made public records easier to find, but easier to find isn't the same as easier to understand. Most Kentuckians have no idea what bills are moving through Frankfort, and the official sources written for insiders don't close that gap. The design problem: turn a firehose of legislative data into something a first-time reader can actually use, without ever telling them what to think.
Process & research
I design, build, and maintain the product end to end, and I treat user feedback as the roadmap. Two examples:
The official bill summaries were too vague to share with voters -> this became the plain-language summary feature.
A veterans-post trustee flagged that a bill's real-world impact was missing from its page; that became an editor-verified accuracy mechanism I shipped the same day.
Key decisions
Plain-language summaries. Each bill gets a plain-English summary with a "Who it may affect" clause, an automated accuracy check, a visible disclaimer, and a feedback link.
Neutral by design. No adjective characterizes a bill as good or bad, and honest notes about where the data falls short (e.g. "topic tags are automated and can mislabel some bills").
Built for newcomers. Warmth comes from anticipating confusion: a civic-term glossary, in-context tooltips, "Find my legislators" instead of "district map." Copy is even device-neutral ("select," never "tap/click").
Scoped deliberately. I cut local-government tracking to focus on the General Assembly and do one thing reliably.
Outcome
Live and maintained in production. Syncs all 1,700+ bills of the 2026 session daily from public sources (LegiScan, Open States, and the Legislative Research Commission calendar), with a district-map legislator lookup by address and an opt-in email digest of factual status changes only. Built solo across the full stack (Next.js, Supabase/Postgres, Mapbox, and Claude for summaries) via AI-assisted development.
