About Alignvote™
Alignvote helps media organizations and civic groups create Voters Guide matchmaking quizzes.
The premise of Alignvote is that it's too hard for most voters to figure out where they agree with and disagree with various candidates on the ballot. Political journalism has turned into siloed cheerleading. And the generic candidate statements on voters guides often try to be all things to all voters. But politics involves tradeoffs, and if you press candidates (and even if you do not), you'll eventually find areas where they disagree.
Media companies and civic organizations might find it useful to put out voter-candidate matchmakers, which serve as kind of a dating app for voters.
Think of Alignvote as a software platform, like Survey Monkey or Google Forms, but to create these types of quizzes. We don't particularly care what the content is of your voter-candidate matchmaker, only that you're interested in creating a Voters Guide to help voters find their best-match candidates on the issues you think are of interest.
The Alignvote survey platform lets civic and media organizations easily make, deploy and measure smart voters guides. These voters guides are fun and easy to use. They help candidates get the word out on their positions right when voters are deciding. And they help voters quickly identify areas of agreement and disagreement, for further discussion or consideration.
For civic organizations, Alignvote can help with Get Out the Vote (GOTV) and awareness-raising efforts, by enabling a viral, sharable element to the election. The smart voters guides are simple to create, can be embedded in your own website, shared via QR codes, via text or email campaigns. They require no coding.
For candidates, participating in an Alignvote survey gives you a chance to get your messages, logo, campaign website right when voting decisions are being made. But only if you've answered the questions.
Alignvote is about transparency. It's a matchmaking survey platform that lets media and civic organizations quickly spin-up voter-candidate matchmakers.
Alignvote made its debut in the 2019 Seattle City Council race, and was available again in the City Council, City Attorney and Mayoral races of 2021. Alignvote has delivered more than 60,000 voter-candidate matches. It was featured on Seattle's news media: KUOW, KOMO and several blogs. Now in version 3.0, we've taken lessons learned from these elections, written a generalized platform, and are making Alignvote available to any organization that wants to use it for a modest fee.