Want to try it out? Check it out here. Also see the 2017 edition, still running with campaign finance data and everything!

Local voting information should be easy to find. Even in an era where Google makes finding things easy, good local candidates go missing, while okay candidates with truckloads of money are almost unavoidable on social media.

MSPVotes is an online, non-partisan voter information guide, putting local candidate information in one place. Everything from social media, forum participation, surveys, and public appearances, to campaign finance analysis. Voters can find their candidates and districts by entering an address, and then construct a ballot through a familiar process of swiping to eliminate.

Starting in 2017 Minneapolis/St. Paul municipal elections, MSPVotes grew into a reliable resource for locals to learn who is on their ballot, follow candidates, compile campaign finance analysis and even helped forum hosts research candidates. When election day came, it was established on Google and social media and throughout the local online political community, and successfully weathered a highly impressive number of visits and uses. All of this was built for free, on volunteer time.

MSPVotes is great tool to signal-boost local candidates running for office, through the simple act of making them discoverable with an easy to use website.

I'm a freelancer in tech (and broke millennial), and spent a lot of time away from work to build the first round of MSPVotes. Kickstarter funding will allow me to devote time to solidifying MSPVotes as a business, and propel it into 2018 elections in the metro area and possibly state-wide. Most importantly, it will give me funds to pay for any labor intensive data collection when needed. A higher level of funding will allow me to launch an instance for another region entirely, and make the system more robust. (Austin? Portland? Seattle? San Francisco? Who's next?!)

For now, I'm fully responsible for all programming work, design effort, and some data collection that went into it, but I couldn't have done this without a network of local political observers and help from @WedgeLIVE.

MSPVotes is a tool that people already love, I want to make sure I have time to do it justice.

Coverage

MinnPost has dubbed MSPVotes "the world's greatest Twin Cities voter guide"!