Watching the bare-knuckle cage match that is our presidential election in 2016, it’s no wonder voters are tempted to just unplug the television and bolt the door until Election Day. But the team behind the networking site Brigade wants you to turn those frustrations into something productive. The website, funded in part by tech billionaire Sean Parker of Napster, Facebook and Spotify fame, was founded as a virtual forum for civic engagement and is now turning its attention to getting out the vote in November.
In the site’s earliest incarnation, political enthusiasts sparred over policy proposals, hoping to convince ideological opponents to switch sides or, at the very least, see another point of view. In the last few months, Brigade has shifted its emphasis to the election: Political allies in the same district declare which candidates they’ll be supporting in the voting booth, from the commander-in-chief all the way down to county coroner, with the goal of rallying like-minded folks to the cause.
When visitors first log in, they are asked for their address and presented with dozens of issue-related survey questions. Then, their answers are compared to other users (including people in their area) who’ve pledged their votes to a specific candidate. This is particularly useful, CEO Matt Mahan points out, for down-ballot races: After the incessant media coverage of the presidential race, voters may know who they want to see in the Oval Office, but still have no idea who’s best suited to represent them on Capitol Hill, much less in City Hall.
Brigade joins the likes of Turbovote, which sends electronic reminders about key registration deadlines, and BallotReady, which can fill in any knowledge gaps in down-ballot races. NBCU and Vote Smart provide a comprehensive suite of tools to help with every step of the process, including a quiz that matches users with a candidate based on policy positions; a comprehensive FAQ page that covers eligibility, registration, polling places and more; and a tool that lets people check the voting requirements in their state. Users who were granted early access to Brigade’s new ballot tool have already pledged almost 300,000 votes for candidates from the top of the ticket to the important, but frequently overlooked, down-ballot races. And they invited almost 1 million friends to pledge votes as well.
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But what distinguishes Brigade from other voting tools is its permanence: Members can wonk out, regardless of how far away the next election is. Think of it as Facebook for the politically minded.
“We believe a voter network needs to exist in the world,” says Mahan. “We’re creating a way to make the political process more accessible, engaging and transparent for ordinary people. That’s our long-term vision for Brigade: to bring democracy online.”
Because Brigade tracks a user’s pledges, it’s easy for people to see their impact, like how many opinions they’ve changed through online discussions or how many people they’ve recruited to their candidate. Elizabeth McAlexander, of Knoxville, Tenn., for example, knows she’s swayed 110 other Brigade users to vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein, measurable data you can’t find anywhere else.
Donald P. Green, a political scientist at Columbia University whose research focuses on how to mobilize and persuade voters, will be studying the impact of Brigade’s pledges on turnout. While his job requires him to be a “determined skeptic,” he believes that Brigade’s social influence could boost participation. “Many people feel disconnected from the political process. In some ways, even though they are interested enough to register to vote and feel a sense of civic duty, it’s as though they were invited to a social event. Without that extra nudge of saying, ‘Hey, let’s go,’ they might just miss this one,” he explains. “Anything that brings people into contact with each other or reminds them of social norms tends to increase turnout.”
To be sure, the site still has its share of partisan strife — users who’d rather take personal swipes at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump rather than discuss those candidates’ positions — but Mahan believes those conflicts will subside once the election is over. He references the time a San Francisco county supervisor, Scott Weiner, logged in to debate affordable housing policies, a model for what he expects to see in the future as the site’s following pressures elected officials to make an account.
Once a new president is sworn in, Mahan sees Brigade as an important driver in guiding the issues that the new administration will focus on. Rather than imitate the mud-slinging candidates did in the run-up to the election, Mahan hopes users will be able to carry on high-minded political discussions and collaborate on solutions. “There’s a lack of faith today that our political process works,” says Mahan. “There’s a feeling that participation doesn’t matter and that the system is rigged.” And that may be the biggest reason of all for forums like Brigade to exist — to create a much-needed space for citizens to meaningfully carry out their civic duties.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Tag: voting technology
This User-Friendly Tool Gets You In The Know Before You Vote
With the presidential primary election looming, Chicago public school teacher Megan Augustiny introduced her high school civics students to BallotReady, an online guide to down-ballot races. (Think: state attorney, judgeships, city council — candidates that first-time voters in her class had never heard of, but would soon be electing to office). The nonpartisan site compiles essential information that voters need on little-known candidates — their job experience, positions on controversial issues and endorsements accrued — making it easy for students (and all voters) to “access information in the way they are used to,” she says, favoriting contenders as if their sample ballot were an Instagram feed.
Which is just what Alex Niemczewski and Aviva Rosman, two recent University of Chicago grads who co-founded BallotReady, had envisioned. Both are reserved, heads-down types who prefer to focus on their work, speaking softly about their high-minded ideals of involving more people at all stages of the democratic process. The two built the site in their spare time and spent just $180 on marketing to launch BallotReady. Within a few months, it irreversibly changed voter behavior across Illinois, where thousands of people logged on to the site. During this year’s bombastic election season, instead of skipping many of the contests, or worse, casting an uninformed vote, BallotReady users now have at their fingertips valuable information about local and regional candidates that are virtually unknown to most people.
For a glimpse of BallotReady’s reach, all one needs to do is log on to Twitter on Election Day.
Done. Whole-ballot voting, couldn’t have done it without @BallotReady pic.twitter.com/aLlZdGPTNk
— Tim McGovern (@herdingbats) March 15, 2016
Loved @ballotready! Never been more well informed going into an election. #illinoisprimary https://t.co/KQ8608ag8F
— Khalfani Myrick (@KhalfaniMyrick) March 15, 2016
.@BallotReady thx to you, for the first time ever, i feel informed about my vote for Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner 🙂
— Hassan S. Ali (@hassanisms) March 15, 2016
.@BallotReady Thanks for helping me be smart about this privilege. #vote #chicago #YourVoiceMatters pic.twitter.com/GrnmD3isG6
— Emily Drake (@EmKDee) March 15, 2016
In states where it’s active, BallotReady is so popular that politicians ask to add specifics to their profiles, offering new possibilities for local campaigns that are too small to attract media coverage or buy their own advertisements. If a school board member sees her opponent vows to support a charter school expansion, for instance, the incumbent may add more details to her education platform. “If a candidate says, ‘I support education,’ we don’t include that, because everybody does,” Niemczewski says. Although, “if a candidate didn’t support education, we would include that,” she adds.
BallotReady emerged from a collision of two pasts: Rosman’s as an enthusiastic electioneer and Niemczewski’s nonprofit work, as well as her knack for code. A self-avowed political junkie, Rosman started participating in the political process in middle school, driving with her dad from their native Massachusetts to New Hampshire and attempting to sway the state’s swing voters every election. In 2004, she nearly failed two high school classes when she used frequent flier miles to campaign for John Kerry in Florida. Four years later, while staffing a congressional race in Illinois, Rosman realized her knowledge was severely lacking. “I was trying to inform people about my candidate, and yet, I was unprepared to vote for all these other people on the ballot,” she remembers. Then in 2014, Rosman ran for a seat on the school council in Chicago. She asked Niemczewski, an old classmate then coaching Chicago’s unemployed into IT jobs, to vote for her. “I didn’t even know there was an election,” Niemczewski says, admitting to missing the vote. The two stayed in touch and a few months later, collaborated on the guide that developed into BallotReady.
More than 160,000 voters in Illinois, Virginia, Kentucky and Colorado have used BallotReady to inform their choices — a 10-fold growth from its launch last fall. The site is expanding its reach, developing profiles for candidates in Maryland, New Hampshire and Florida. Scaling hasn’t been easy: “It takes a lot of phone calls and relationship-building. That’s kind of daunting,” Niemczewski says, noting that 100 volunteer curators are needed to build candidate profiles, “but it’s also exciting, because it means we can really help.” By year’s end, BallotReady hopes to reach 1 million voters, and by 2020, to be in every state.
Since BallotReady is committed to educating every American citizen, it devotes resources to eliminating digital access issues that arise. Once, Niemczewski responded to a request from an elderly woman in an assisted living center. After the woman reported being unable to load BallotReady, Niemczewski troubleshot the problem by backdating the site’s functionality, so the senior citizens could use it on their outdated computers.
Ultimately, BallotReady’s founders work to make their innovative site as user-friendly as possible — to both the older electorate and young, first-time voters alike. That mission is just one of the reasons why teachers like Augustiny thinks that its online repository of candidate profiles is a great way to get Millennials more involved in elections. “The Internet is so pervasive at this point: it informs everything that we do, especially for younger people. Not having that information readily accessible online was a real disservice to young people,” she says.
As a teacher, Augustiny always wants her kids to develop in-depth research skills. But when it comes to voting — an activity that’s made so many Americans apathetic — she’s in favor of turning to BallotReady for a digital shortcut.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
MORE: Investing in the Future: This Visionary Program Gets Students Hooked on STEM
How Los Angeles County is Rethinking Antiquated Voting Technology
With 4.8 million registered voters, 5,000 polling places and the need to provide voting material in 12 different languages across the country’s largest election jurisdiction, Los Angeles County has its hands full during election season.
Which is why local election administrators are looking beyond repairing old systems to design a new one that meets the unique needs of its voters, according to Governing. The project, helmed by registrar-recorder/count clerk Dean Logan, is aimed at creating a public-owned and operated, transparent and safe system that ensures voters their ballot is accurately cast and counted.
The current system, which was developed by the L.A. County government during the late 1960s, employs different contracts from various commercial vendors for components of the overall voting system, according to Logan. He contends there has yet to be a voting system on the market to meet L.A. County’s needs, and creating a modernized system rather than rebuilding a version of an existing model is the solution.
“We also have a very diverse electorate and we are economically diverse,” Logan said. “So we serve areas that are very affluent and conditioned to options with technology; we also serve areas that are dependent on public transportation. We have a homeless population that needs to be served in order to vote. It’s just really a unique jurisdiction in terms of the combination of all of those elements.”
Using a “sizable public investment,” Logan’s team is designing a system that’s geared toward optimizing the voter experience, one of two projects across the country pioneering a new frontier in voter technology. In Travis Country, Texas, local officials are implementing a similar project.
Rather than building customized hardware for the system, L.A. County plans to leverage technology already on the market and instead focus on creating secure software to load onto hardware. The reason why they’re not creating customized hardware? It would have to eventually be replaced, Logan argues. By focusing on software, the county can keep up with technology without starting all over with each new advance.
The new system will also separate the processes of marking the ballot from counting it, in contrast to the current system which combines both components.
“We want to build a ballot-marking process that has flexibility and is adaptable to the electorate we serve,” Logan said, “for those voters who vote by mail, for those voters who might want to go to a vote center, or vote early or at neighborhood polling places.”
The system would separate a paper-based, easy-to-read, tabulated ballot from the physical device where the ballot was cast, he adds — something that doesn’t exist in the current market of systems.
County administrators have not decided whether they plan to use private contractors, but will focus on developing specifications for the system before finding a manufacturer.
“So, instead of a vendor that will build the system, designing it around its business model and its ability to make a profit on it, we want to design it,” he explained. “We get the specifications and then we put it out to bid for a competitive process to determine who wants to build it, but according to the specifications that are already adopted.
While the system is not expected to be ready for the 2016 Presidential Election, local election administrators around the country will be watching to see whether the taking the plunge is worth the investment.