Making Voting Easier with a Personalized Ballot Guide

How we created a tool to help you vote based on where you stand on local issues in San Francisco, and Manchester NH.

Figuring out who to vote for and how to vote on propositions is hard. Voting in local elections is even harder because of lower media coverage to help educate, and remind people of the election. Local government has more real world impact on people’s everyday lives than other levels of government. For example, libraries, schools, and police departments all fall under local government jurisdiction. Yet less and less people are voting in local elections, and the gap is even more drastic for voters in the age group between 20 to 34.

Voter turnout in the 2014 midterm elections (36.3 percent) was the lowest it’s been since World War II. Turnout for local elections is even lower, with research showing only 1 in 5 eligible voters show up for mayoral elections.

- Knight Foundation

Why aren’t people voting anymore?

People aren’t voting because of the lack of trustworthy information available, people don’t feel informed, and don’t know where to find valid sources to educate them on how to vote. Moreover, there isn’t really a social norm on voting among millennials. When was the last time you and your friends had a discussion on how to vote in the local election? Like the saying: never talk about religion, sex, money and politics at the dining table. Talking about politics isn’t cool.

Our mission to make voting easier

We set out to build a ballot guide that is easy to use, filled with information from various trustworthy sources, included social features that allows you to see your friends’ vote pledges, push notification reminders on when to vote, and all that lives within the Brigade app. Once you’re ready to vote, the ballot guide becomes your little cheat sheet so you can breeze through the ballot without panicking or skipping over ballot items because you weren’t prepared to make a decision at the voting booth.

Take a side on local issues, get personalized ballot guide, make sure your side wins

Traditional voter guides are printed, large, and painful to decipher. Instead, we partnered with local organizations like San Francisco Chronicle, Evolve CA, and more to come up with ballot recommendations based on your answers on local issues. With each recommendation, the endorsing organizations added more context to help you complete your ballot guide. The entire process is much faster, simpler, and less stressful. Instead of spending hours trying to figure out how to vote the night before election day, take 15 mins on your iOS or Android device and decide how to vote days if not weeks ahead. Armed with the knowledge of what these ballot measures mean to you, and how it will affect the city you and your friends live in, we built an invite feature that lets your friends get their own ballot guide, and pledge their votes with you.

I Voted!

What’s the fun in voting if I can’t brag about it? Just kidding. But we recognize the importance of voting, and we think that good behavior deserves rewarding. So I made a little sticker for people to claim once they have confirmed that they voted. By confirming, you get to share this out to social networks #humblebrag, and also get a badge that will live with your avatar on your Brigade profile.

So what did we learn?

As of Oct 29, just 4 days before San Francisco’s election day. 16% of our users in San Francisco are using our ballot guide feature. And 29% of our users in Manchester, NH are using ballot guide. Keep in mind that in order to use the feature, you must be registered to vote in the respective cities. I find this to be a huge positive sign that even though the tool is on its first iteration, it is proving to be useful enough for people to interact with, and learn about local issues. Just the other night I wasn’t sure how I felt about Proposition F, and found myself taking out the app to learn more so I can have an educated discussion with my friends at the dinner table.

If you’re interested in how the election is playing out, we created a quick Live insights page to allow anyone look at how each candidate and ballot measure is doing!

We also built landing pages for individuals to share how they are voting. Check out how the San Francisco board of supervisors; Scott Wiener, and Jane Kim, are voting this year!