Chicago startup Civis Analytics wants to help you encourage friends to hit the polls Tuesday with an app that identifies likely democratic voters in your phone contacts.
Announced this week, VoteWithMe helps you connect with your left-learning friends and encourage them to vote. Civis, which built the app for Civic Innovation Works, a social welfare organization that looks to increase people's engagement in civic matters, says the app uses publicly available voter records to predict which of your contacts are likely to support Democratic candidates, and then gives you a list of the top 10 people who can make a difference for Democrats in the presidential race as well as down the ballot. VoteWithMe chooses people based on the likelihood that they support progressive candidates, and that they live in a battleground state. The algorithm even identifies people who it thinks have a higher likelihood of not turning out to vote.
The idea is that users will text their friends and remind them to vote. The app provides people with sample messages that they can copy and paste, as well as links to other resources like voting locations and early voting information. VoteWithMe is an experiment in personalizing voter outreach, Civis says. It plans to take the data it gathers this election season and measure its effectiveness compared to traditional get-out-the-vote methods.
"We're committed to maximizing turnout, and we believe that personal contacts can be highly effective," the company says on the VoteWithMe website. "This app is part of an experiment to test that. After the election, we'll be using our data science expertise to figure out how your efforts did relative to traditional campaign methods."
Civis was founded by Dan Wagner and born out of the Obama campaign, where Wagner led a 54-person analytics team. In 2013 he brought 22 Obama campaigner's with him to Civis.
Image via VoteWithMe
