Two new tools to manage your November 3rd ballot in San Francisco

The handbills littering the streets and TV ads cluttering the air waves can mean only one thing — it’s time again to cast our votes for candidates and legislation across the country. Love it or hate it, Election Day is two weeks away, so it’s high time to figure out your ballot. If you live in San Francisco, getting informed just got easier with two new tools from civic tech startups Brigade and CrowdPac.

Brigade

Building on the summer beta launch of the Brigade app for sharing political opinions, Sean Parker’s civic startup is piloting a new ballot guide in San Francisco and Manchester, New Hampshire. Eligible users are presented with a brief onboarding process of “taking a side” on statements related to their local election that uses Brigade’s existing user interactions. From there, the ballot guide presents recommended candidates and propositions for which you can pledge your vote, and see how others have pledged.

While the candidate and proposition profiles do list endorsing organizations, they lack detail that I’m looking for when considering my vote. The social overlay is nice, but probably does not hold much weight considering the small pool of voters using the Brigade app so far. Overall, though, it’s a solid first step towards voter engagement, and starts shed some light on where the Brigade product roadmap and business model is heading.

CrowdPac

Crowdpac is a brand new startup with an admirable mission — “to make it easier for citizens to learn about politicians, and to find and support political candidates that match their priorities and beliefs.” Their site is a clean combination of reporting and tracking tools for issues and elections. Similar to Brigade, they are piloting a voter guide in two major U.S. cities, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

For candidates running for office, they’ve created a “CrowdPac Score” based on publicly available information on campaign finance records, stated positions and voting history. Overall, I applaud this data-centric approach, but I’m dubious of their choice of a “Liberal” vs. “Conservative” axis that appears across their site on everything from candidates to issues to legislation. I’m not sure this simplistic rendering does much to advance political discourse beyond the red-blue rut we’ve been in for decades.

More useful in San Francisco, however, are their handy, information-rich guides to local propositions. I especially appreciate how their focus on financial transparency comes in to play here by clearly displaying who spent how much to approve or defeat a specific proposition. With many millions being spent to influence the San Francisco electorate, this is information that every resident needs to have at their voting fingertips.

Of course, there are plenty of other tools out there, including traditional voting guides by The League of Pissed Off Voters, The League of Women Voters, and SPUR, along with the surprising return from the grave of The Guardian Clean Slate. Whatever tool you use, just be sure to get educated, and get out the vote. It’s the least you can do.