Your Ballot, Decoded: The Detroit Voter Guide Is Live

For two editions, The Signal has covered the builders — the students, the robots, the season. This month we shipped something different. Not a robot. A civic tool, built the way we build robots.

The Detroit Voter Guide is live now: detroitautomationacademy.com/voter-guide.html

Here's what it is, and why an automation academy built it.

What it is

Ten races. Sixty-three candidates. Three ballot questions. One page.

It starts at the top of the ticket — the open governor's race — and runs through U.S. Senate, the 13th District House seat, the statewide offices (Secretary of State, Attorney General, Supreme Court), and the education boards that sit at the bottom of the ballot: the State Board of Education, the UM Board of Regents, the MSU Board of Trustees, and the Wayne State Board of Governors.

Each race gets a comparison table. Each candidate gets the same treatment: what they claim, in their own words, next to what's on their record. And where we couldn't verify something, an amber flag that says so plainly. Every claim carries a source. Every gap is marked, not filled.

That's the part most voter guides skip: the holes. We'd rather show you the hole than paper over it. A guide that hides its gaps is asking for trust it hasn't earned.

The three statewide ballot questions get the same plain-language treatment — what each measure would do, in words a normal person can read, with the same sourced, gap-flagged discipline. Plus who's currently holding each office, so the names on the ballot aren't strangers.

Take the quiz, build your list

Six questions: abortion access, voting rules, health care, guns, the economy, energy and climate. Answer them and the guide shows you which candidates' stated positions line up with your answers — quoted, not paraphrased into someone's spin.

No account. No tracking. Your checklist lives in your browser, on your device, and yours alone. Nothing you tap ever leaves your phone. When you're done, print the reference sheet and take it to the polls.

That's the whole workflow: quiz, compare, print, vote.

Why an automation academy built a voter guide

Because the skill transfers. Our students learn to verify before they trust — check the sensor reading, test the assumption, flag the uncertainty instead of burying it. A voter guide built that way looks different from one built to persuade you. It doesn't tell you who to vote for. It shows its work and lets you decide.

Detroit is the center of gravity; Michigan is the wider field. Every design choice starts with the Detroiter standing in the voting booth wondering what half these offices even do. If you've ever stared at the bottom of a ballot and guessed, this was built for you.

Ad-free. Permanently.

Saying it plainly: sponsorship buys placement in this newsletter. It never buys influence over the guide. No sponsor reviews it, shapes it, or appears in it. The voter guide is ad-free — not for this election, forever. If that ever changes, you'll hear it from us first. That's the deal.

Thirty-six days

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3 — thirty-six days from now. Open the guide, take the six-question quiz, build your checklist. Then send it to one Detroiter who says the ballot is confusing. You know one. We all know one.

The robots taught us to build. The ballot is just another system worth understanding.

The Signal is the newsletter of Detroit Automation Academy — where Detroit builds what's next. New editions monthly. If you know a young builder who should be in the room, send them our way.