Distinct-voice weighting
A consultation results dashboard that renders three side-by-side figures (raw submissions, distinct arguments, and verified distinct submitters), with campaign responses labeled rather than hidden.
As AI agents make it cheap to mobilize or generate submissions in bulk, a raw count of how many arrived stops telling an agency how widely a position is held. The same total can mean a broad, independent constituency or a single campaign amplified at scale, and a report that shows only the count cannot tell the two apart.
The challenge is to present results so that volume (how many submissions) and breadth (how many distinct positions, from how many independent sources) can be read separately, without making mass participation look illegitimate.
When results are reported, government needs to read breadth of support rather than raw volume, so a campaign that mobilizes many people behind one position is not mistaken for many independent positions. That means the report has to distinguish how many submissions arrived, how many distinct arguments they carry, and how many verified distinct people stand behind them.
The people most at risk are legitimate mass participants: if the interface foregrounds a distinctness metric in place of the raw count, a real constituency that mobilized behind one position can be made to look illegitimate, as though its numbers did not count. Keep the path open by reporting raw counts and distinct-argument counts together, never one instead of the other, and by labeling campaign responses rather than hiding them, so breadth is shown without erasing the people who turned out.
A results dashboard that shows three figures together: raw submissions, distinct arguments, and verified distinct submitters. It presents breadth as distinct positions from independent sources rather than as a single count, with campaign responses tagged rather than removed.
No surface has been built yet; the approach above is the brief for one.
- Emerging Headline
Reporting practices that separate campaign from distinct responses already exist.
- Frontier
A dedicated interface that shows volume and breadth side by side has no established precedent.
UK Government Consultation Response Reporting. UK consultations routinely distinguish "campaign responses" (template-based, often facilitated by advocacy organizations) from "detailed responses" (unique, substantive submissions). The "Growing Up in the Online World" consultation explicitly noted that campaign responses "reflect the reach and mobilization capacity of organizing groups rather than independent views" and reported campaign and non-campaign responses separately.
UK Copyright and AI Consultation (2025–2026). The report acknowledged that many responses "either repeated or built upon a set of template letters or template survey responses that were created and distributed by interested organizations or individuals," and reported these separately from original responses.
CDO Council Deduplication Metrics. The CDO Council's pilot produced a "distinctness ratio" of raw submissions to distinct comments (its worked example collapsed 267 near-identical submissions to 9 distinct comments) that could be surfaced in dashboards.
Coglianese / Balla Academic Research. Cary Coglianese's research on e-rulemaking documents that in high-volume dockets the great majority of mass-campaign comments are near-identical and add little distinct substantive content, so raw volume is a poor proxy for the breadth of views expressed. Steven Balla's analysis of 1,049 mass comment campaigns across 22 EPA rulemakings (2012–2017) found that the EPA references mass campaigns in its responses but cites them at lower rates than unique comments, an implicit form of breadth weighting.
Moderate to high. The UK's practice of reporting campaign vs non-campaign responses is immediately transferable. The harder design challenge is building dashboards that show distinctness metrics without appearing to dismiss mass participation. Any "distinct voice" metric must be presented alongside raw counts, not instead of them.
Presenting distinct-submitter and distinct-argument counts alongside raw volume guards against the volume-as-evidence shortcut that, generalized, lets a single inflated signal drive a high-stakes decision.