The Website You Need to Know Before Election Day 2020

From Town & Country

The November election is now less than month away, and it seems like the endless ads, campaign videos, leaflets, Tweets, Instagram Stories, and shouting-match debates are only just beginning. Through the noise, it can be difficult for some voters to know where candidates stand on the issues that matter most to them.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, there's a simple website that can help you get back to basics: Know Your Vote. Founded by Selena Strandberg—a former consultant who also spend time in Silicon Valley—Know Your Vote is essentially a database. You can search by type of race (Presidential, Senate, House of Representative, Gubernatorial), plug in your zip code, and select candidates to compare. If you have just a few key issues you intend to vote on—whether it's Covid-19, climate change, or police reform—you can quickly access a candidate's views on those issues.

Know Your Vote is rigorously non-partisan, using only three types of publicly available data to indicate candidate's view on a given issue: primary sources (things the candidates have said in public statements, on their social media channels, or on their campaign site); academic sources (such as university studies); and government sources (like Congressional voting records or FEC documents). Know Your Vote cites the source under each piece of information about that candidate, so you can know where it came from.

Strandberg spent the last six years at various tech startups in Silicon Valley, and was previously a consultant at Deloitte who worked with large government departments and agencies. She saw how the country's politics worked, and how our technology apparatus worked, but she saw a wide gulf in how voters use technology to access information about politics.

"It became clear that voting efforts have historically focused on registration but haven’t focused on the information piece," she says.

"In 2018 I was in San Francisco, voting in the California midterms, and the ballot was extremely overwhelming. I spent hours of time researching. Even though I'm someone who follows politics really closely, it required a ton of time to dig in and understand," she recalls.

In states like California, there can be questions on the ballot that put an issue directly to the voters, bypassing the traditional legislative process. These kind of "direct democracy" measures often require a lot of background information to truly understand both sides, and not all voters are willing to spend hours doing that research.

Nor should they have to, Strandberg says. "The technology exists to solve this problem. We can make a database where voters can access this information and understand where the candidates are on every issue."

Know Your Vote is largely designed for savvy, younger voters who are frequently online (the organization's recent partnerships with Barry's Bootcamp, and upcoming ones with Patagonia and Outdoor Voices, also speak to that demographic.) These voters might get their news from Instagram or Twitter, or by following one-woman news-outlets, like longtime ABC and CNN reporter Jessica Yellin. With Know Your Vote, Strandberg hopes people can cut through the noise and get the facts.

"The ideal is to make a place for politically curious people to feel politically empowered before they vote. We want to enable people to choose the things they care about and make them feel confident," she says.

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