Pingtsi is a small, independent team of engineers, researchers, and election specialists. We started with one conviction: the same technology used to persuade voters can be used to inform them instead.
Over the past several decades, there has been a democracy recession. Across numerous democracy indexes, democratic institutions have weakened with little reprieve. Rise in the number of conflicts as a result of electoral outcome disputes, coup attempts in burgeoning democracies, and contestation of elections and voter eligibility are clear evidence of this trend.
Even in well-established democracies, voters have expressed post-election regrets about who they elected into the most important office of their state. An investigation into why they voted for that candidate reveals that they have little understanding about their candidate's policies. Through what was supposed to inform voters, social media has prioritised a candidate's ability to entertain. It has become less about policy and more about augmented personalities energised through viral contents on social media.
We believe that a vote is more valuable than that.
Increased cost of living, inflation, and wage stagnation has resulted in time poor voters. Researching the latest policy shifts, new parties and emerging coalitions, and keeping up to date with news contexts become an impossible task when you have families, friends, and work to balance. This decay in civic education and political awareness results in apolitical voters that are either uninformed or misinformed due to imperfect information.
We believe that voters deserve better than that.
In many liberal democracies, the role that political donations and dark money plays has eroded the value of a vote. Once election campaigns begin, social media platforms and digital advertisers are fed unimaginable amounts of money to endlessly bombard voters with political ads and debate clips. Even candidates that share this vision against dark money admit that this is how the game is played. The reality is, the more funds you raise and the more money you spend, the higher chances of winning.
Our solution against dark money is this: if voters stick with the values and policies of a candidate, political spending becomes less effective — and the demand for dark money simply would not exist once voters stop responding to political ad campaigns. We want to help strengthen that idea of informed democracy and create a world with less dark money.
We believe that elections are too important of a democratic exercise to be undermined, deprioritised, or bought.
Pinky presents positions side by side with citations. It never scores, ranks, or recommends a vote.
Every answer given during an election is logged and published after polls close, for anyone to review.
Each launch is built with in-country partners, in the languages voters actually speak.
We follow the exact same principles of any electoral commission that facilitates voting. We are a team of multidisciplinary academics, graduates, and students from the Australian National University. You can be assured that we approach electoral integrity with academic rigor and stewardship.
Our team has no motive or incentive to skew or create bias in Pinky. Our goal with Pinky is simple: inform voters.
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We hire slowly and carefully — engineers, election researchers, and localization leads for upcoming launches.