Have you ever entered a voting booth on Election Day only to feel hopelessly lost in a sea of electoral choices?
ElectNext, a new startup, is aiming to help fix that by helping you choose the politicians that most closely reflect your own views — think of it, says the creator, as online dating for politics.
The idea is simple: First, users are asked to pick three issues that are most important to them. Choices include immigration, abortion, foreign policy and nine other categories. Next, users have to answer at least 10 additional questions to find their political matches — the more questions answered, the more accurate the results.
As a demonstration, this writer answered questions the way a Libertarian voter might — and indeed, Ron Paul was the top result (ElectNext also shows results for Congressional races).
Users can dive into a comparison of their results with various politicians, allowing them to better understand why they match up with certain candidates. The site also has a social element — users can see exactly where politicians stand on certain issues and offer an opinion of their own in agreement or disapproval. With each survey question also comes an invitation for users to leave an argument for one stance or another.
Once a user has his or her results, he or she can donate or sign up to volunteer for the candidate directly from ElectNext.
ElectNext is upfront and transparent about its data sources, arrogating information from news reports, interest groups and direct quotes. Additionally, the entire ElectNext staff has put their personal results on the site so users know their ideology (serendipitously, there's a fairly even mixture of viewpoints on the team).
The site is the brainchild of Keya Dannenbaum, a Fulbright scholar who holds an M.A. in Political Science from Princeton University and previously worked for Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign. After the Clinton campaign, Dannenbaum was hired on with local campaigns in Connecticut.
It was the comparison between national-level and local work that helped Dannenbaum find the inspiration for ElectNext. In local elections, said Dannenbaum, lie the "real tangible issues that local leaders are responsible for," but she added that local elections "are based on a handful of votes" because so few people participate.
"I thought, 'my gosh, here, where it matters most is exactly where voters are checking out,'" said Dannenbaum.
That's where Dannenbaum's goal lies. Not satisfied with the 4,500 politician profiles already on ElectNext, Dannenbaum wants to build out the site to cover every election happening across the country — perhaps even the world.
"Our vision is to produce a useful way for any voter in any election in U.S. and elsewhere to vote in an informed way all the way down their ballot," she said.
More than 55,000 people have visited ElectNext over the past three months. To Dannenbaum, that's a sign that the engines can be set to full steam ahead.
"It's a really convincing sign that we can take this tool that is fun and useful at three federal levels," she said.
Dannenbaum's ultimate goal is to build a tool that increases voter participation across the U.S. That's a difficult statistic to measure, especially because the site is so new — but it's certainly on her mind.
"One thing we'd like to do is measure if people using our platform are voting at significantly higher levels," she said. "That would be a good indictation that this is providing a service that engages people to vote."
Dannenbaum is proud of the site her team has built.
"It's been so fun to have this idea, watch it grow and really see what this could be in the big picture," she said. "I think we're on to something."
Would you use a site such as ElectNext to help you make your voting decisions? Sound off in the comments below.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke
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