No. Recommendations are grounded entirely in the values you describe in your own VOTER.md — not a party platform, not this site's opinion. Two people with different values get different, equally legitimate recommendations from the same ballot.
Your VOTER.md and ballot research stay on your machine by default. Nothing is sent to this server unless you explicitly choose to publish a profile or a placard — see the Privacy section on the homepage for exactly what that involves.
It's a small computational puzzle your device solves before publishing — a few seconds of CPU time, not a cryptocurrency and not a payment. It raises the cost of mass spam without requiring an account, an email, or any identifying information.
The skills themselves are free and MIT-licensed — no cost from VoteThisWay. The AI agent you run them in is a separate cost that varies: some, like Antigravity, have a free tier with metered limits; others, like Claude Code, require a paid plan. Check your specific agent's own pricing before assuming it's free.
VoteThisWay is designed for any AI environment with local file access to read and write your VOTER.md profile:
• CLI agents: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Antigravity, Copilot CLI, or Opencode (auto-configured via the install script on the homepage).
• Desktop agent apps: Tools like Cowork, Codex app, or Cursor can install skills directly from your chat prompt: “Read https://votethisway.org/v1/openapi.json and install the VoteThisWay skills into this workspace.”
• Browser web chat: In ChatGPT, Claude.ai, or Gemini web, you can use the interview prompts manually, but you will need to save and paste your profile text into subsequent chats yourself since web tabs cannot access local files.
Every agent that has one — Claude Code, Codex CLI, and others — uses its own incompatible format, and some gate listings behind a formal review or identity-verification process. The install script on the homepage works identically across every supported agent, with no per-marketplace approval and no separate format to track as each one changes. Worth revisiting if the ecosystem settles on something closer to a standard.
Those are excellent primary sources — VoteThisWay's skills actually cite them. The difference is VoteThisWay doesn't hand you a generic voter guide; it has your agent research your specific ballot against the specific values and tradeoffs you describe, not a one-size-fits-all summary.
A hosted guide — VoteMate and sites like it — runs the model on their servers, under a system prompt you never see. You get the summary, not the instructions that shaped it, and no way to diff those instructions against last week's. That is a lot of trust to extend on the one question where framing does the most work: an assistant nudged a few degrees in some direction reads exactly as neutral as one that wasn't. VoteThisWay inverts that — the skills are plain markdown files on your own disk, so you can read them, edit them, diff them, or refuse to run them, and you choose the model yourself and pay for it directly. Your address, your values and your ballot never leave your machine unless you deliberately publish them.
Every skill is instructed to ground recommendations in primary sources (official ballot text, voting records, campaign finance filings) and to say so explicitly when a source is thin or unconfirmed, rather than guessing. Always sanity-check anything before you vote on it — treat it as thorough research, not gospel.
An optional, separate feature: after researching your ballot, you can publish a small, curated set of your picks and reasoning at a public, unguessable link with a QR code — meant to be shared or printed, the way a physical yard sign advertises a cause. It's entirely optional and carries no location data. Signs are temporary: each one is deleted 30 days after publishing, and the link stops working then. See a sample digital yard sign.
I built VoteThisWay for myself — I wanted to research my own ballot grounded in what I actually care about, not a party platform or someone else's guide. I'm sharing it because I think it's good enough for most voters in the U.S., not because I'm trying to build a platform. Creating the skills took real time and effort, so I hope they work out of the box for most people — but they're MIT licensed, so if you want to tinker, go nuts. More about me: bhal.dev.
Every skill cites U.S. institutions — FEC, congress.gov, state legislatures, Ballotpedia, Vote411 — and assumes U.S. ballot structure: federal/state/local races, propositions, judicial retention. The site itself only serves visitors from the U.S. for the same reason. Building this well for one country mattered more than building it thinly for many.