What was Takahiro Anno's 2024 Tokyo campaign?

When you think of an election campaign, you probably picture a one-way flow: candidates give speeches on street corners, and voters listen. In the 2024 election for Governor of Tokyo, one candidate tried to make things flow the other way too — an election in which the candidate listens to voters and revises his promises on the spot.

The Governor of Tokyo heads the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and the post is filled by an election in which Tokyo's voters choose among the candidates.

In short

In the July 2024 election for Governor of Tokyo, Takahiro Anno, an AI engineer running as an independent and a first-time candidate, stood for office. Anno tried to change the election from one in which a candidate delivers his ideas one way into one in which he listens to voters' opinions [1][2][3].

Concretely, he did three things. He used AI to summarize voters' opinions and show them like a map. He revised, during the campaign, a manifesto (list of campaign promises) that he had published online so that anyone could suggest changes. And he had an AI double, "AI-Anno", answer questions around the clock [3][4][5]. The result was 154,638 votes and fifth place [4].

For example

From an anonymous suggestion box to removing an income cap. The campaign turned 951 opinions extracted from posts to an anonymous suggestion box into a scatter plot with Talk to the City (a tool that uses AI to organize large numbers of opinions and draw them as a chart). This revealed a cluster of voices asking for the income cap on child-rearing support to be removed. After the policy team examined the budget, the request was reflected when the manifesto was updated from ver1.0 to ver2.0. The change is public on GitHub as change proposal #221 [3][4].

Revising the manifesto on GitHub. On June 20, 2024, the campaign published the detailed version of its manifesto. GitHub is a tool used in software development, where anyone can file "issues" (raising a problem) and "pull requests" (proposing a change) on a document. The campaign used it to accept proposals for the manifesto. The final decision on whether to adopt each one was made by Anno himself [2][4].

AI-Anno. This was an AI avatar (a digital double) trained on Anno's policies. On YouTube livestreams, it answered questions from the comment section by voice. Later, people could also ask it questions by phone [3][4].

In more detail

It started with the book Plurality

According to Hirokazu Nishio's account, on May 13, 2024, Anno contacted Nishio, then the leader of the project to translate Plurality into Japanese, saying he wanted to hear about Plurality. Nishio introduced Anno to Haruyuki Seki of Code for Japan. At a meeting of the three on May 23, Seki introduced Talk to the City. On May 30, Nishio tried the tool on about 20,000 AI-related public comments (opinions sent in response to a government's call for comments on a draft) [3].

At the press conference announcing his candidacy, Anno said he had consulted Audrey Tang of Taiwan before running and had been told that Tang liked his approach [1]. Tang herself wrote in an August 2024 column: "One of the book's key concepts, augmented deliberation, demonstrates how AI can be harnessed to enable broad listening. This idea resonated with Takahiro Anno, an AI engineer, who, after a virtual conversation with me, decided to run for the Governor of Tokyo" [6].

A cycle of "listening, refining, and communicating"

Anno described the campaign as three mechanisms that keep turning [4][7].

1. Listen — In addition to street speeches (56 locations in all) and visits to facilities, the campaign gathered voices through the hashtag "#TOKYOAI" on X, an anonymous suggestion box made with Google Forms, questions to AI-Anno, and phone calls. It made them visible with Talk to the City [4][3]. More than 30 reports were produced during the campaign [3].
2. Refine — The campaign accepted proposals for the manifesto on GitHub. It combined this with systems that used AI to automatically remove abuse and inappropriate images and to find overlapping discussions [4]. The GitHub repository was frozen (archived) on July 6, 2024, the last day of the campaign period [8].
3. Communicate — Updates to the manifesto were reflected on the website right away, and AI wrote articles about what had changed. Questions to AI-Anno fed back into "listen" [4][3].

The numbers differ from source to source

The figures for this campaign differ between sources. Here the differences are set out as they are.

Proposals on GitHub. There were 232 issues and 104 pull requests. On how many were adopted, a staff review (July 18, 2024) gives 72: 72 adopted, 19 not acted on and 13 declined, for a total of 104 [9]. Anno's own review (July 16), on the other hand, writes that 85 were reflected in the manifesto, and a footnote in the English edition of Plurality likewise says "85 were adopted" [4][10]. None of the sources explains the gap between 72 and 85. Note also that the pull requests include some submitted by the campaign's technical team and policy members, so not all of them came from voters [9].

How many questions AI-Anno answered. These figures also differ by source [4][7][10][3].

• Anno's review: more than 8,600 in total (7,400 on YouTube, 1,200 by phone)
• An ITmedia article: 7,600 for the YouTube version, and more than 1,200 for the phone version
• The footnote in Plurality: about 7,400 questions over 16 days (only the English edition adds that this was 77% of the questions submitted)
• The book Broad Listening (written by volunteers in the DD2030 community; the section by Nishio): about 6,200 on YouTube over 14 days, and more than 830 by phone over 10 days

Stumbles and fixes

On its first day, AI-Anno's program would not run on the streaming computer, and it started an hour late, rather than at 7 p.m. as planned. It later stopped at times because of a memory problem. The campaign published an account of these failures as a review article (a "postmortem") [11].

With Talk to the City, an error was found in which the AI used one person's misspelling of a candidate's name in a summary heading. Because the team then decided to have humans check the reports, only a small fraction of the more than 30 reports could be made public [3].

The campaign also analyzed, using a method similar to that of Polis, the data from a voting experiment that a private company had run on its own using the authentication of the My Number Card (Japan's national identification card). But Nishio recalls that because the campaign could not decide the questions, the results could not be used in the election [3].

After the election

During the campaign, on July 4, the campaign had already published its election accounts [12]. After the election, on September 30, it released the programs for AI-Anno, the manifesto repository and a map of poster boards as "digital public goods" for anyone to use [5].

This experience led to later developments: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's call for opinions for its long-term plan (broad listening for Shin Tokyo 2050; "Shin Tokyo" means "New Tokyo"), the volunteer community DD2030 and its tool Kouchou AI (広聴AI; kouchou is the Japanese word for listening to the public, and the English edition of the book Broad Listening renders the name "Broad Listening AI"), and the political party Team Mirai. Nishio writes that the need for a way to share reports within the team before publishing them, and for a Japanese-only interface, was one of the things that led to building Kouchou AI [3].

What is debated

Reflections by those involved (Anno himself, and Nishio, who supported the campaign on the technical side)

• Who decides in the end? Anno writes that he believed a manifesto one can take responsibility for cannot be made by today's AI or by simple majority vote, so he made the adoption decisions himself. He then looked back and said that who finally decides and how, and how to deal with ideology, remained open questions, referring to a point raised by the critic Hiroki Azuma [4]. According to the announcement of an event at Genron Cafe, Azuma, while praising Anno's election strategy, asked whether someone aiming to be a politician should think not only about technology but also about ideology. The announcement says this question would be taken up again with Anno and others at an event on September 18, 2024 [13].
• GitHub is not for everyone. Anno himself acknowledges that GitHub is not easy for everyone to use. He writes that the phone version of AI-Anno was set up in a hurry after hearing that some people do not use YouTube [4].

Criticism from outside

• Expecting too much of AI. Writing in the magazine Wedge (October 30, 2024), Azuma credited Anno with making a mark on elections. While in favor of bringing AI into public administration, Azuma argued that the idea that politics could be made semi-automatic is dangerous, and that expecting too much is a mistake [14].

Common misunderstandings

• The misunderstanding that "scatter plot = broad listening". The scatter plot made a strong visual impression, and this led people to take the chart alone to be broad listening. Nishio writes that Anno's plan was the whole cycle of listening, refining and communicating, and that turning opinions into a chart was only one component of it [3].

Where it fits in Plurality

Chapter 5-4 of Plurality, "Augmented Deliberation", presents this campaign as an example of cutting-edge approaches "beginning to appear not only in policy deliberations and community dialogues but also in electoral processes". It lists the published manifesto, voter feedback through many channels, visualization with Talk to the City, and an AI avatar answering around the clock, and writes that "he demonstrated a [sic] interactive form of 'broad listening'" [10]. A footnote says that the roughly 150,000 votes (2.3%) marked "the highest number of votes in history for a candidate in their 30s in the 22 past Tokyo gubernatorial elections" [10][15].

In a December 2025 lecture, Tang called Anno "《多元宇宙》這本書的讀者" (a reader of the book Plurality), and described him as someone who decided to run after reading the book and who used the same tools, such as Pol.is and Talk to the City [16].

The book Broad Listening cites this campaign as the leading example, on the politicians' side, of the type in which politicians and governments use the tools directly without going through a discussion forum [17][18]. The types are explained in the article on broad listening.

Further reading

1. Plurality, chapter 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation" (English, book) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/
2. Audrey Tang, "AI Stirs Political Waves in Tokyo" (English, column) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2024-08-08-BW-Column-AI-Stirs-Political-Waves-In-Tokyo.md
3. Broad Listening, "Takahiro Anno's Initiatives in the 2024 Tokyo Governor Election" (Japanese and English, book) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/04_01_takahiro_anno_initiatives.md
4. Takahiro Anno's review, "15万票" (150,000 votes) (in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/takahiroanno/n/n3fce136f9003
5. Postmortem of AI-Anno's outages (in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/annotakahiro24/n/n935287ed888b
6. Hiroki Azuma, "AIの力で民主主義はアップデートできるのか？" (Can democracy be updated with the power of AI?) (in Japanese, article) — https://wedge.ismedia.jp/articles/-/35528

Sources

1. Takahiro Anno, full transcript of the press conference announcing his run for governor (press conference 2024-06-06, published on note 06-07, in Japanese) — https://note.com/takahiroanno/n/nead5c2e2454b
2. Takahiro Anno, announcement of the "participatory manifesto" (2024-06-20, in Japanese) — https://note.com/takahiroanno/n/n38a34f107867
3. Broad Listening, chapter 4, section 1 "Takahiro Anno's Initiatives in the 2024 Tokyo Governor Election" (Hirokazu Nishio; in Japanese, English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/04_01_takahiro_anno_initiatives.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
4. Takahiro Anno, review "15万票" (150,000 votes) (2024-07-16, in Japanese) — https://note.com/takahiroanno/n/n3fce136f9003
5. Release of the source code used in the election (2024-09-30, in Japanese) — https://note.com/takahiroanno/n/nf0bc57572dd7
6. Audrey Tang, "AI Stirs Political Waves in Tokyo" (Business Weekly column, 2024-08-08) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2024-08-08-BW-Column-AI-Stirs-Political-Waves-In-Tokyo.md (Chinese version: https://sayit.archive.tw/2024-08-08-%E5%95%86%E5%91%A8%E5%B0%88%E6%AC%84%E7%94%A8-ai-%E6%8E%80%E8%B5%B7%E6%94%BF%E6%B2%BB%E6%BC%A3%E6%BC%AA ) ［CC0］
7. ITmedia AI+ article (2024-07-22, in Japanese) — https://www.itmedia.co.jp/aiplus/articles/2407/22/news033.html
8. README of the manifesto repository — https://github.com/takahiroanno2024/election2024
9. Review of the GitHub policy repository (2024-07-18, in Japanese) — https://note.com/annotakahiro24/n/nef45fab195ea
10. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation", text and footnotes — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/ ［CC0］
11. Postmortem of AI-Anno (in Japanese) — https://note.com/annotakahiro24/n/n935287ed888b
12. Publication of the election accounts (2024-07-04, in Japanese) — https://note.com/annotakahiro24/n/nccb82392e3f3
13. Genron Café event page (2024-09-18, in Japanese) — https://genron-cafe.jp/event/20240918/
14. Hiroki Azuma, "AIの力で民主主義はアップデートできるのか？" (Can democracy be updated with the power of AI?) (Wedge, 2024-10-30, in Japanese) — https://wedge.ismedia.jp/articles/-/35528
15. Plurality, Japanese edition, 5-4 "拡張熟議" (Augmented Deliberation), text and footnotes (in Japanese) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/jpn/ ［CC0］
16. Audrey Tang (唐鳳), Right Livelihood lecture (2025-12-04, verbatim transcript in Chinese) — https://sayit.archive.tw/2025-12-04-%E6%AD%A3%E5%91%BD%E8%AC%9B%E5%BA%A7 ［CC0］
17. Broad Listening, chapter 1 "What Is Broad Listening?" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/01_what_is_broad_listening.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
18. Broad Listening, chapter 3 "Digital Democracy, Broad Listening, and New Ways of Delivering Public Voice" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/03_digital_democracy_and_new_public_voice.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］