Vote With Me
October 21, 2020 7:37 AM Subscribe
Vote With Me
Who you vote for is private but whether or not you voted is largely public record. Vote With Me tries to match your contacts against the voting records, so you can identify people you know who didn't vote last election and maybe just need a gentle push from you to make their vote concrete.
Some of you may remember Vote With Me from the 2018 election (NYT, The Verge) - I certainly did, and wanted to use the app for a voter pledge drive where folks would be responsible for 10 of their friends & family members, making sure they were registered to vote, made a plan to vote and ultimately voted. To my chagrin I saw that the app had been acquired in 2019 by another company which hadn't been able to update it, and I reached out to them asking if they were planning on updating the app before November, also offering my help if needed. I was surprised to hear back and even more surprised when they took me up on my offer.
I mentioned this to a friend and he offered to post it on a developer slack group he's part of, and we got two incredible volunteers and went to work. Bitrot is a very real thing, it turns out, but we finally got the backend and app updated, and it's actually launched on iOS! The Android version is, weirdly, in review purgatory at the moment but we're hoping that by the time you read this it will also be released.
The biggest caveat is data quality - it is, in two words, not wonderful. We're missing data from CA, ME and VA, and if you have contacts that have moved recently odds are they'll be incomplete too. If you've done phonebanking before you know that less-than-stellar data is unfortunately par for the course, but just be aware. And if you or large swathes of your contacts live in CA, ME or VA, check out the OutVote app, which features similar functionality (though it's somewhat hidden away, and the app itself is a little more overwhelming as it offers much more in the way of features).
Vote With Me has an interesting origin story - it was initially developed by New Data Project, I believe where Mikey Dickerson focused his efforts after leaving Google and saving the Obamacare website (and potentially Obamacare). I had no role in the app's creation but we did bring it back from the dead, and we hope you find it of some use.
Who you vote for is private but whether or not you voted is largely public record. Vote With Me tries to match your contacts against the voting records, so you can identify people you know who didn't vote last election and maybe just need a gentle push from you to make their vote concrete.
Some of you may remember Vote With Me from the 2018 election (NYT, The Verge) - I certainly did, and wanted to use the app for a voter pledge drive where folks would be responsible for 10 of their friends & family members, making sure they were registered to vote, made a plan to vote and ultimately voted. To my chagrin I saw that the app had been acquired in 2019 by another company which hadn't been able to update it, and I reached out to them asking if they were planning on updating the app before November, also offering my help if needed. I was surprised to hear back and even more surprised when they took me up on my offer.
I mentioned this to a friend and he offered to post it on a developer slack group he's part of, and we got two incredible volunteers and went to work. Bitrot is a very real thing, it turns out, but we finally got the backend and app updated, and it's actually launched on iOS! The Android version is, weirdly, in review purgatory at the moment but we're hoping that by the time you read this it will also be released.
The biggest caveat is data quality - it is, in two words, not wonderful. We're missing data from CA, ME and VA, and if you have contacts that have moved recently odds are they'll be incomplete too. If you've done phonebanking before you know that less-than-stellar data is unfortunately par for the course, but just be aware. And if you or large swathes of your contacts live in CA, ME or VA, check out the OutVote app, which features similar functionality (though it's somewhat hidden away, and the app itself is a little more overwhelming as it offers much more in the way of features).
Vote With Me has an interesting origin story - it was initially developed by New Data Project, I believe where Mikey Dickerson focused his efforts after leaving Google and saving the Obamacare website (and potentially Obamacare). I had no role in the app's creation but we did bring it back from the dead, and we hope you find it of some use.
Role: programmer
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