Chatbot vs. Bloomington candidates for city office

With each election cycle, the League of Women Voters hosts a website with candidate profiles. It’s called Vote 411.

Included below are links to all the LWV profiles for all candidates in Bloomington’s city primary elections—for mayor, clerk, and city council.

The Vote 411 profiles include the answers that candidates have written to questions posed by LWV.

What if the same questions were posed to a chatbot that has been trained on a giant corpus of text, to respond to conversational prompts?

The B Square posed the LWV’s questions to ChatGPT, which is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by a company called OpenAI. It was released late last year. (GPT stands for Generative Pre-training Transformer.)

The LWV questions were given minor tweaks, like swapping in “Bloomington, Indiana” for “the city” to give ChatGPT a shot at providing answers that reflect the unique circumstances of Bloomington.

Another tweak: In places where the LWV questions use the second-person pronoun “you,” some kind of passive voice construction was swapped in. That’s because ChatGPT tends to respond with a disclaimer of sorts when asked about itself. For example, “As an AI language model, I have never tasted maple syrup, …”

Readers are invited to use ChatGPT as a kind of baseline, to judge the answers given by candidates. Is a given candidate’s answer better than a chatbot’s? Continue reading “Chatbot vs. Bloomington candidates for city office” →

Holcomb visits Bloomington, Cook Group president tells locals: “We can’t sit around and wait for the governor…to solve our problems.”

Eric Holcomb.

Pamela Whitten.

Pete Yonkman.

It’s a sign. (Feb. 16, 2023)

On Thursday, the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce hosted a luncheon at the Monroe Convention Center featuring Indiana governor Eric Holcomb.

The main event highlighted Holcomb as he fielded questions from Indiana University president Pamela Whitten, as the two sat in easy chairs in front of an audience of about 450 people.

But for many in attendance, it was the remarks delivered by Cook Group president Pete Yonkman, towards the start of the program, that might have left a more lasting impression. Cook is Bloomington’s second largest employer behind Indiana University.

Yonkman said at the start that he did not have prepared speech to deliver, as he does on most occasions.

But the impromptu remarks that Yonkman did make were organized around one basic theme: Bloomington’s local leaders need to overcome their differences to make progress on important issues.

Specific issues that Yonkman highlighted included housing, conditions at the county jail, and the lack of progress on the convention center expansion. Continue reading “Holcomb visits Bloomington, Cook Group president tells locals: “We can’t sit around and wait for the governor…to solve our problems.”” →

2023 Bloomington Elections | Primary field for Dems set: 3 for mayor, 5 of 6 council districts contested, 7 candidates for 3 at-large seats, 1 for clerk

Democratic Party candidate names are in blue. Republican Party candidate names are in red. The locations for dots and labels of candidate names correspond to where the candidates live.

On Jan. 4, residents were able start filing official declarations of candidacy in the 2023 Bloomington primary elections.

But at noon on Friday, the time for filing official paperwork expired.

No unexpected declarations for mayor were recorded on the last day of filing. That means voters across the city in Bloomington’s Democratic Party primary on May 2 will have three mayoral candidates to choose from: Kerry Thomson; Susan Sandberg; and Don Griffin.

And Democrats will have a pool of seven at-large city council candidates—from which to choose three.

There’s only one candidate in the Democratic primary for city clerk—incumbent Nicole Bolden.

Republican voters will have no citywide candidates to choose from.

The one independent candidate for mayor who has filed paperwork to establish a committee is Joseph Davis. But he has not yet submitted the 352 signatures that he needs, in order to be placed on the Nov. 7 general election ballot. The deadline for Davis and any other independent candidates to submit signatures is June 30.

Continue reading “2023 Bloomington Elections | Primary field for Dems set: 3 for mayor, 5 of 6 council districts contested, 7 candidates for 3 at-large seats, 1 for clerk” →

2023 Elections | Day One notebook: 9 file paperwork, including 3 known mayoral candidates

Sue Sgambelluri (Bloomington city council District 2)

William Ellis (Ellettsville town council Ward 2)

Jonas Schrodt (Bloomington city council at large)

Ron Smith (Bloomington city council District 3)

Brett Heinisch (Bloomington city council District 3)

Wednesday was the first day it was possible to file the forms to declare an official candidacy for municipal elections in Indiana’s 2023 election cycle.

In Monroe County, nine candidates got that paperwork task out of the way on Day One.

Filing their CAN-42 forms on Wednesday, in order of filing, were: Kerry Thomson (Bloomington mayor); Susan Sandberg (Bloomington mayor); Sue Sgambelluri (Bloomington city council District 2); Don Griffin (Bloomington mayor); Ron Smith (Bloomington city council District 3); William Ellis (Ellettsville town council Ward 2); Jonas Schrodt (Bloomington city council at large); Brett Heinisch (Bloomington city council, District 3); and Nicole Bolden (Bloomington city clerk).

Ellis and Heinisch filed to run in the Republican Party’s primary. The others filed to run in the Democratic Party’s primary. Continue reading “2023 Elections | Day One notebook: 9 file paperwork, including 3 known mayoral candidates” →

2020 Bloomington city council: Out with the old, in with the new

At the last city council meeting of the year, on Dec. 18, 2019, Bloomington’s mayor, John Hamilton, delivered proclamations to the four outgoing councilmembers.

On Jan. 1, 2020, four new councilmembers were sworn in to start four-year terms, along with the five returning councilmembers, the mayor, John Hamilton, and the city clerk, Nicole Bolden.

Starting around noon on New Year’s Day in the city council chambers, the oaths of office for Bloomington’s 11 elected officials were administered. Continue reading “2020 Bloomington city council: Out with the old, in with the new” →

District 3 city council race: 2-point margin for Democrat Ron Smith over independent Kappas

Ron Smith (left) and Nick Kappas visit at an Oct. 28, 2019 candidate forum. (Dave Askins/Beacon)

Marty Spechler at the Oct. 28, 2019 candidate forum. (Dave Askins/Beacon)

Ron Smith on election night after results were counted. (Dave Askins/Beacon)

The three-way race on the ballot for Bloomington’s city council District 3 seat wound up a close two-way contest between Democratic Party nominee Ron Smith and independent Nick Kappas. Independent Marty Spechler was a distant third.

Just 23 votes, or 2.4 percentage points, separated Smith from Kappas. Smith received 448 votes (46.3 percent), Kappas 425 votes (43.9 percent), and Spechler 95 votes (9.8 percent).

Of the seven precincts in District 3, Kappas won four of them. Kappas had 20 more votes than Smith among voters who cast ballots on Election Day—Kappas tallied 354 votes, compared to 334 for Smith. But Smith had a bigger advantage among voters who cast their ballots early—Smith got 114 of those votes compared to 71 for Kappas. Continue reading “District 3 city council race: 2-point margin for Democrat Ron Smith over independent Kappas” →

Bloomington city council campaign filings: Party support means Republican candidate enjoys 20-to-1 funding advantage over Democrat

cropped 10-18-2019 voting central-IMG_7239 — The banner for early voting hangs at Election Central at 7th and Madison streets in downtown Bloomington. Early voting starts Oct. 21. The deadline for filing campaign finance reports for the period ending Oct. 11 was last Friday at noon. (Dave Askins/Beacon)

Friday at noon was the deadline for pre-election campaign finance filings in Bloomington’s city council races. Election Day is Nov. 5.

The campaign finance forms filed for Bloomington’s District 3 city council race by were pretty much politics as usual.

One District 3 candidate, independent Marty Spechler, didn’t file the paperwork by the deadline, which is not smiled upon by election officials, but is not all that uncommon. The other two District 3 candidates, Democrat Ron Smith and independent Nick Kappas, together raised in the neighborhood of $3,000.

But the way that sum was divided between the independent and the Democrat was maybe a little unusual for Bloomington’s political culture, which is mostly dominated by Democrats. The $2,350 in itemized contributions collected by Kappas for the filing period was more than twice as much as the $973.22 shown on Smith’s paperwork.

Definitely unusual was the nearly 20-to-1 funding gap between Republican Andrew Guenther and Democrat Sue Sgambelluri in District 2. Guenther’s contributions totaled $37,375, compared to $1,919.70 for Sgambelluri. That includes $8,000 for Guenther reported separately as a large donation, after the reporting period ended.

The largest part of contributions to Guenther’s campaign, including the separately reported $8,000, came from the Monroe County Republican Party. Added to the $22,500 donated to Guenther by the party since the reporting period started (on April 13), it would bring Guenther’s Republican Party total to $30,500.

The Republican Party’s filing shows that of its $31,790 in itemized contributions, $30,000 came from a single donor, Doug Horn.

On Nov. 5 this year, city council Districts 2 and 3 are the only districts where elections are being held. Elections are not being held in Bloomington’s other four districts because the county election board cancelled them, because none of the races were contested there, and no citywide races were contested. Continue reading “Bloomington city council campaign filings: Party support means Republican candidate enjoys 20-to-1 funding advantage over Democrat” →

Key topics for District 3 city council race forum: convention center, transportation

cropped 10-16-2019 kappas spechler smith IMG_7062 — From left, Bloomington District 3 city council candidates: Ron Smith, Nick Kappas and Marty Spechler. (Dave Askins/Beacon)

At a forum held on Wednesday night for Bloomington city council candidates in District 3, an audience of around a dozen Bell Trace residents heard from the three candidates who are on this year’s ballot: Nick Kappas (independent), Ron Smith (Democrat), and Marty Spechler (independent).

Bell Trace is a senior living community on the city’s east side. Residents had questions about two specific topics: transportation and a planned convention center expansion downtown.

The timing for those topics squares up with a couple of public meetings planned before the end of the month, on Oct. 29. One is the kickoff to a series of meetings hosted by Bloomington Transit about a proposed new route configuration, which has been studied for more than a year.

Another meeting set for Oct. 29 is a joint meeting of the city council and the county council about the plans for the expanded convention center.

All three candidates expressed support for the convention center expansion. Mayor John Hamilton, who was having dinner at Bell Trace with his mother-in-law, dropped by the forum to express his support for fellow Democratic Party primary winner Ron Smith. Hamilton was also asked about the convention center. He said he was “a little worried” about it, but was confident that it would move forward. Continue reading “Key topics for District 3 city council race forum: convention center, transportation” →