How KnowYourVote Is Helping Make Every Voter An Informed Voter

Engaging users in the early-stage development of technology is vital to ensuring that the technology is built to serve user needs. City Tech strives to make users part of the technology development process through our resident engagement program, which invites Chicago residents to contribute to emerging technology while providing public, private, and social sector partners with feedback to improve product design and deployment.

City Tech leads resident engagement and usability testing exercises, engaging our 1,600+ member Civic User Testing group (CUTgroup) ; our CUTgroup not only provides essential feedback and increases the long-term sustainability of public-facing technology solutions, but members also experience cutting-edge early-stage solutions.

While City Tech usually leads our own testing and engagements, we occasionally encounter and share outside opportunities that are not run by City Tech but are aligned with our core mission– to accelerate technology-enabled solutions to make cities happier, healthier, and more productive. These opportunities often provide unique opportunities for members to shape new technology.

In August 2019, City Tech shared an early survey about the KnowYourVote concept with CUTgroup participants as part of KnowYourVote's research to understand how voters receive their information on candidates. City Tech worked with KnowYourVote on the survey and compensation structure, as well as offered additional feedback about testing through CUTgroup. KnowYourVote received over 100 responses through the early-stage survey with CUTgroup, which, combined with additional academic resources and individual interviews, informed the platform. Launched earlier this summer, the service allows users to build their ballot by entering their zip code and individual race (Presidential, Senate, House of Representatives, Gubernatorial, State or Local), or select from a few key issues and quickly see candidates’ views.

City Tech is grateful to have provided our Civic User Testing group members the opportunity to give feedback on a tool that has now grown to help voters across the nation.

Click here to learn more about CUTgroup and become a member.

Read more below from Forbes to learn about KnowYourVote’s origin, the platform's status today, and how it is helping voters understand the issues and candidate's stances.

In recent weeks and months, it’s become clear that many Americans consider this year’s election the most important of their lifetimes, and it’s with that thinking in mind that record-high numbers of people have already cast their votes and even more are expected to on Election Day. But this heightened participation has also led to more advertisements, campaign videos, texts, Tweets, Instagram stories, Facebook posts, and media coverage than any election cycle in history, and it’s left a lot of voters feeling confused and overwhelmed. Here to help those voters is KnowYourVote, a new service that seeks to break through the noise by showing voters where the candidates stand on the issues that matter most to them.

Founded by Selena Strandberg, a lifelong politico and a government-consultant-turned-techie, the site was inspired by her real-life experience. “I had a lot of friends in 2018 who actually were not planning to vote in the mid-terms because they didn’t feel like they had access to enough good information on the candidates and the issues,” she remembers. One friend in particular thought researching the candidates and combing through endless vats of information would take too much time, so Strandberg volunteered to make her a voter guide that matched her viewpoints. When she started digging her teeth into the project, though, she found it to be an impossible task. “I’m someone who’s spent her entire life following politics and studying it, and I know the difference between a good source and a bad source, but ultimately, I didn’t have enough time to pull it together for her before the election,” she says.

But the experience did open Strandberg’s eyes to a huge problem, and she felt she was just the person to fix it. “I was in this interesting nexus between the worlds of government and tech, and I knew that there was actually a technical solution to this problem,” she explains. “I also knew there was a source of truth out there and that we could aggregate all the good political data and facts into one place, where you could understand them and understand who candidates are and what they represent.”

Strandberg spent the months that followed researching the ways that voters got their information—first through academic resources, then through online surveys, then by speaking one-on-one to Americans across the country. What she heard was a general disappointment with existing sources of information and a need for a user-friendly database that was engaging to consumers, especially young ones. “Products that exist tend to present voting in a very patriotic light, and they’re geared toward policy wonks,” she says. “But in my experience, those aren’t the people who need this because policy wonks generally already know who they’re supporting.” Instead, she envisioned something that would play to young voters and would engage them in the places and ways they already were.

After releasing a Beta version of KnowYourVote during the primaries, Strandberg and her small team officially launched the platform this summer. The interactive database essentially works in two ways. You can build your ballot by entering your zip code and focus on an individual race (Presidential, Senate, House of Representatives, Gubernatorial, State or Local), or you can select a few key issues from a long list and quickly see candidates’ views on them. “A lot of people only really vote based on a handful of issues, and especially in targeting younger voters, they have a handful of things that they care about the most,” the founder notes of her thinking behind the approach. “So, we wanted to make the site so that if you have a few issues that you care about, you can see quickly and easily where the candidates stand on those specific issues. You don’t have to sort through a whole platform of extended candidate policy.”

Finding accurate, unbiased, trustworthy information on candidates doesn’t exactly sound like an easy undertaking, and understandably, it has proven to be a complex endeavor for KnowYourVote, but Strandberg has crafted what she believes is the ideal plan of attack. “Early on, we made a really strong commitment to use academic, government, or primary sources only on the candidate profiles,” she explains. “Our thinking was that sources coming from highly-regarded academic institutions or from government databases are in fact very high-quality sources and that primary sources were coming directly from the candidates mouth without any editorializing.” The site believes strongly in the power of transparency, so each and every source utilized is listed, and there’s a button over every piece of information that lets users see the source. Additionally, Strandberg and her team just rolled out a partnership with Logically, an AI-based organization that does fact-checking, so in the future, there will be a layer over the top of what candidates have said that fact-checks it.

KnowYourVote has also collaborated with several big-name, national brands, including Outdoor Voices, Patagonia, and Glossier, since launching just a few months ago. “Kind of in line with the idea of going after young voters and approaching them in a consumer-friendly way, the idea was really to reach them where they’re at,” Strandberg says. “And that kind of came in the form of on social media and with big brands.” This fall saw the site’s largest brand partnership yet in the form of Barry’s Bootcamp, which has served as a 360-degree campaign with the workout giant getting its own “Barry’s by KnowYourVote” page. “For all of these brands, we basically serve as a place for them to kind of direct their followers for high-quality information that is reliable and trustworthy,” the founder explains.

With just a few days left before the election, Strandberg hopes that the service she’s built will help voters across the country feel more informed and empowered when it comes to filling out their ballots, but she’s also looking to the future, well beyond this November. “I think that as society continues to be even more polarized, we’ll sort of see people naturally sustaining their interest in this, and it’s a matter of helping them find ways that they can plug in to causes and to races and to politics,” she says. “I think a lot of people see the current political environment as an anomaly and as a Trump phenomenon, but I very much think that no matter who wins this election, we will not see politics go back to ‘business as usual.’” With the widening role of social media in disseminating information and creating or contributing to polarization, the KnowYourVote founder believes that America will continue to have a divisive landscape for some time. “For that reason, I think there will continue to be a natural interest in races at every level,” she says. “And it really is a matter of making sure that people who want to participate can do so.”

Read the article at Forbes.