What this is: VIOLETS is a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) chatbot that answers Maryland voters' questions using text pulled from official state and county election sources. It's embedded as the chat widget inside a Qualtrics survey. Offline, a Python pipeline crawls and chunks official web pages plus a curated set of Box-hosted documents, embeds every chunk, and stores the vectors in Postgres. Online, a guarded FastAPI service turns each question into a search over those vectors and asks an LLM to answer from what it retrieved, citing sources — with guardrails that block PII, reroute sensitive question types to official pages, and re-check every answer for partisan endorsement before it's sent back.