I want a better voter information app

It is election season!  

It is a great time to deeply understand our representatives, their character, their beliefs, and their accomplishments.  Software and the internet should help us do this.   We should be hyper-informed about our options.  We have the greatest democracy and tech industry in the world, so we should certainly have amazing technology to help us engage politically.

What’s There

We do have many tools at our disposal; here is a short roundup of what I’ve found to be available and useful.  

There are a bunch of sites and apps that offer direct information from candidates, from parties, and from the government.

• Senate and House sites.  They do a good job listing legislative activity and who voted for what.  It does require some digging to understand what the politicians in your races of interest have done., there is no simple way to say, “I live in this district; show me all the voting records and info about all my elected officials.”   There is a lot of “inside baseball” on these sites — I have no idea what a “Senate Vote-arama” is and why I should care.   There is also enough disclosure data to drown in up here, so much so that it is impossible to see the forest for the trees.  
• State and local sites. The Washington Secretary of State site, which is OK close to elections, but not really populated with information much in advance. I am sure other states have equivalent info. The King County ballot tracking site is great for following your mail-in ballot.
• Individual candidate websites.  These seem largely worthless; they are asking for money and have a lot of meaningless platform boilerplate.  Quintus told Cicero in 64 BC, “Promise everything to everyone,” and nothing has changed since.  
• GOP and Democratic party websites, both national and state.   Similar to individual candidate websites, I find little reason to visit.
• Incessant text and mail spam from politicians and parties.  “Most critical election of our lifetimes, give by midnight, 20x matching!”  These are instant blocks for me.  They are content-free and full of hyperbole and bias.
• The Federal Election Commission.   Boatloads of data about campaign contributions.  Very comprehensive, a little unwieldy to navigate.

This is a deep and comprehensive pool of available information.   It is a lot of work to sift and sort it all, but it is great that it exists, we are fortunate to have access to it all. It is too sprawli g for most of us to spend a lot of time in, so we all tend to rely on some organizations to filter and amplify it for us.  Sometimes at our peril.

• Mainstream media sites.  Driven by views and clicks, a lot of sensationalism and bias, you can get some information here but it is often wrapped in so much misdirection that it is hard to know what to believe. I read a diversity of sites to try to discern what is going on.
• Social networks.   Sometimes these surface useful things, but in general they are even more unhinged than mainstream media, and their algorithms are designed to divide and inflame.
• Partisan voter information sites, such as the Progressive Voter’s Guide, and I am sure there are conservative variants.  This site does provide the most complete list of all the races I am interested in or eligible to vote in.   Of course, it comes with a strong editorial voice.
• Open Secrets.  A great aggregation of campaign finance data, with a very strong commitment to nonpartisan independence.  I do wish I could log into the site and create favorites and a dashboard of just my favorites.
• GovTrack tries to put a little more usable face on the Senate and House site data.  Certainly it gives clearer explanations of some legislative activity.
• USAFacts.  Steve Ballmer’s effort, a lot of good coverage in here, with a strong attempt to just deal in facts.
• Polling aggregation sites like 538.  If you like polls, hard to know how much credence to give a lot of these.
• Aggregation sites like BallotPedia or VoteSmart or Vote411.  They try to aggregate all the races and let you browse them, tho the data can be pretty spotty.  Candidates seem to ignore these sites.
• Voter landing page sites like BallotReady and Activote.  They try to create a landing page for a voter with just the most relevant races.   They are not completely fleshed out, and in the case of Activote, the vibe feels off.  It peppers me with questions about my political positions, it feels like I am being harvested.

Overall, a lot of information is available, but there is also a lot of noise.  And sifting through it all and assembling it into a coherent feed for me, covering the races I care about, well, that is a lot of work.  

What I Want

I would like an app focused on me, the voter.   On the landing page, a list of all races  — federal, state, local;  both position races and issue races.   Based on my voting address, I want to filter down to the races in which I am eligible to vote.   I want to tag races as favorites (or any other tag).   I want to sort and filter based on my favorite races, tags, poll tightness, funds raised, or any other fields.

For every race, I would see the current candidates with the current polls.   For each candidate, I would see a link to their web page, platform, voting history for any offices they have held, and upcoming appearance schedule.   I would see each candidate’s fundraising and their largest backers.    I would get a link to donate to each candidate or to volunteer.  

Another page would show me the aggregate projected House and Senate races, the projected balance, and similar projections at the state level.

There are some variants of this idea.  It could be an app for a single state.  It could be an app for a single party.  Some state parties do have apps, but they are basically just ways to consume the party’s messaging; they aren’t focused on the upcoming races and don’t provide easy ways to take action.  There could be a progressive voter guide version of the app or a conservative version of the app.   Or maybe the app has a marketplace of editorial voices, and I can choose a particular editorial voice and that will give me a different filter on the races with some additional data tags.  

(As an aside, I’d also love to see candidates really get behind such an app and embrace it to reach out to their constituency.   Not only just take feedback, but also post polls about upcoming votes.   I know candidates have tools to manage their fundraising and to target messaging, but today this results in the spam wave we all get via email and text.  This seems like a terrible way to connect to their constituency, there has to be a better way to use technology to connect to us all.)

I would love to see this app built!   Or a variant of it.  With all the money sloshing around in party and PAC troughs, I’m surprised there hasn’t been an attempt at a party version of this.  Parties and candidates are willing to spend a lot burying me in stupid text messages, which seems so ineffective; a more direct connection seems like it would be smart.

Or maybe some incredibly civic-minded billionaire could build the independent version of this.  Steve Ballmer seems like a great candidate, his USAFacts investment suggests he is willing to do work for the public good.  Or perhaps Mark Cuban — his work at costplusdrugs.com also suggests he is willing to invest to address big societal issues.

Isn’t this just a once-every-4-years kind of thing?

When I was younger, I used to think that my civic responsibility came every 2 or 4 years when I would dutifully vote.  Most of us don’t want to think about politics daily; we would love to keep it in a box and only deal with it occasionally.  Politics can be exhausting and we have lives to live.

However, our government makes decisions that affect all our lives daily.  Every day, there are meetings, legislative votes, hearings, regulation issuances, etc. that will have a material impact on our lives.  It is in our interest to share our views with our elected officials and influence their decisions. 

And every day, PACs and lobbyists are firehosing money at our political system.   I wish this wasn’t true, but it is.   As citizens, we can’t keep up with the money firehose; we have to respond with our voice and our actions and work together to amplify our voice and actions.  I want a tool that allows me to be engaged, in an efficient well-informed way, along with every other citizen, so that our voices are heard and amplified.

Update: I've started to list all the voter tools I use on a separate page.