The Depression era had Eleanor Roosevelt, the MTV generation had Rock the Vote. Our current age has apps. In August, Amit Kumar, an entrepreneur in Menlo Park, California, distressed by the popularity of Donald Trump, released a mobile app called #NeverTrump, which allows users—there are now more than a thousand of them—to win points for prodding friends in swing states to vote. The app matches a user’s contacts with publicly available data, figures out whom the user knows in battleground states, then offers to send those people automated reminders to vote and, especially, to not vote for Trump. “On Facebook, a lot of people post, ‘I want to do something, but I’m in California, I feel powerless,’ ” Kumar said the other day, at an Asian-fusion restaurant in Sunnyvale. “Now you have something to do.”

Kumar, a slim, genial man of thirty-nine, ordered American chop suey, a favorite during his college days in New Delhi. He arrived in the United States in 1998, to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, with “two suitcases and two hundred dollars—the canonical Indian story.”

Kumar dropped out of his program when the first dot-com boom beckoned. He hopped between computer-networking startups before joining Yahoo as an engineer, in 2005. After three years, he left and, in 2009, founded Lexity, which used a Web bot named Sophie to help small businesses market themselves. (“Sophie would say, ‘I’ve done some analysis on your site. The best course of action is to advertise on Google and spend three hundred dollars a month.’ ”) In 2013, he sold the thirty-person shop to Yahoo for a reported thirty-five to forty million dollars. Kumar calls it “a life-changing event.”

A few months after the sale, Kumar and his wife, who works for Cisco Systems, became eligible for citizenship. “Our accountant sat us down and said, ‘Do you really want to do this? Because you’ll have a lot of negative consequences from a tax perspective,’ ” Kumar said. “We didn’t have to think twice.” They took the Oath of Allegiance at a community hall in Cupertino.

Kumar wears designer denim and drives a gray Tesla with his new company’s name on the license plate: Trimian, short for three simians, a nod to the wise monkeys of Japanese legend. It builds networking apps for professionals. Emoji monkeys covering their eyes, ears, and mouth adorn the door of Trimian’s office, which is sandwiched between two acupuncture studios in a Sunnyvale office complex. “If you’re looking for Google or Facebook, this isn’t it,” Kumar said. He passed a pantry stocked with kale chips and protein bars, and a graphic designer balancing on a concave boogie board while typing at a standing desk.

He sat down by a whiteboard and opened the #NeverTrump app on his iPhone. (He coded the beta version over a weekend, and his employees, most of them immigrants, jumped in to fine-tune it.) A pixellated monkey asked Kumar where he was registered and whom he plans to vote for. For argument’s sake, Kumar said he was in Ohio and voting for Gary Johnson. The friendly monkey disappeared, replaced by an admonition: “You are voting for Gary Johnson in a swing state, which could deliver the White House to Donald Trump.” The app explained how Kumar could find a friend in a non-battleground state and “trade” his vote—he votes for Clinton, the friend promises to cast a ballot for Johnson. Sixteen per cent of #NeverTrump users are registered in swing states, and half of them want to vote for a third-party candidate. Last weekend, #NeverTrump unveiled a feature that suggests five to ten users with whom these voters can trade, so they can vote their conscience without inadvertently helping elect Trump. There’s also a chat room where people post messages like “Hey, Robert, if you’ll vote Hillary in Co., I will vote Stein in N.J.”

“Let’s say there are millions of such people, and the margin of victory for Trump is, like, a hundred thousand,” Kumar said. “If we can shift just a few of them over to Hillary . . .” He paused. “This only matters on the boundary condition, when there’s a coulda, woulda, shoulda. It’s back to Bush versus Gore.”

A casual observer of politics—“I wouldn’t consider myself a Democrat”—Kumar was pushed over the edge by Trump’s rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims. Outside, by the Tesla, he brought up Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came . . . .” “This poem about the Holocaust—who would have thought that, less than a hundred years on, we would have to invoke that?” he said.

“America was supposed to be the last bastion of bring me your tired, huddled masses,” he went on. “It doesn’t matter what they believe in, who they believe in. This was their final place. If you’re persecuted, if you’re looking for opportunity, there’s one place you can go. Hence my Iranian swim instructor.” ♦