AI in service of democracy: how we built zakogo.com

Bulgaria is heading into yet another parliamentary election on April 19, 2026. For voters trying to make an informed choice, the challenge is familiar: dozens of parties, hundreds of pages of manifestos scattered across PDFs, social media posts and media interviews — and no single place to compare them. We decided to fix that.

The result is zakogo.com (“Who should I vote for?”) — a free AI-powered tool that structures and compares party programmes across 10 key topics, with a direct link to the public source behind every single claim.

The Problem

Most voters want to vote based on policy, not emotion. But the reality is that reading through party programmes is time-consuming, formats vary wildly, and some parties barely publish anything at all. The information asymmetry is real — and it discourages informed participation.

The Approach: AI as a Research Assistant

We used Claude by Anthropic in two key ways. First, as a research tool — processing lengthy PDF manifestos, extracting key positions by topic, and identifying relevant media sources where party leaders had made public statements. Second, as a development tool — helping write and optimise the front-end code.

The important nuance: AI does not generate the content in the way people typically fear. It accelerates research and structuring. Every claim on the site was reviewed and approved by a human editor. Every source was verified. The final say is always human.

Architecture: Radically Simple

zakogo.com is a static HTML/CSS/JS website. No server, no database, no frameworks. It loads instantly and works offline. This was a deliberate choice — maximum accessibility, minimum complexity. A voter on a slow mobile connection in a rural area gets the same experience as someone on fibre in Sofia.

Transparency as a Feature

Every claim on the platform links to its public source — an official programme, a media interview, or a public statement. If something is inaccurate, it is immediately verifiable. This is the strongest form of quality control: the user can check for themselves. We deliberately avoid sources we consider unreliable, and if a party has no stated position on a topic, we say so rather than filling the gap with assumptions.

Early Impact

Within days of launch, zakogo.com was featured on Bulgaria ON AIR and BNR Horizont. The project has attracted interest from media outlets, civic organisations and individual journalists across the country. The response confirmed what we suspected: there is a real hunger for structured, unbiased political information.

What’s Next

The platform is being updated daily as new sources emerge. After the elections, we plan to track whether legislative initiatives actually match the promises made during the campaign — turning zakogo.com from a pre-election tool into an ongoing accountability platform.

The project is entirely non-commercial. No ads, no sponsors, no party affiliations. Just a small team that believes informed voters make better democracies.

Try it: zakogo.com
Watch the video: YouTube