As we approach one of the most important elections in our country's history, amid a pandemic, BallotReady is ready.
The Chicago startup, the creator of a voter information platform that gives users info about candidates up and down their ballot, has spent years preparing for this moment. Co-founder and CEO Alex Niemczewski first created a voter guide for herself in 2014, launched a public guide in 2015, and made a version for the 2016 election that reached about 1 million voters in 12 states.
Today BallotReady's voter guides are in all 50 states, and Niemczewski expects 50 million people will have used BallotReady by the end of Election Day.
"We're seeing about 10-times as many users now than what we saw at this point in 2018," Niemczewski said in an interview last week, just days before people head to the polls. "Every year the majority of users come the 24 hours leading up to Election Day."
BallotReady's growth comes in part thanks to partnerships with major social media companies like TikTok and Snapchat. With TikTok, the popular video platform is providing a link to voting resources on any video that mentions voting or the election, which includes BallotReady's voter information. Snapchat is also putting BallotReady's info in front of users so they can access its nonpartisan voting guides.
Those social media partnerships have allowed BallotReady to tap into a younger demographic, who may be voting for the first time and are unfamiliar with the process.
"We've found that a lot of people over 55 are really excited about BallotReady," Niemczewski said. "They’re very familiar with the problem because they’ve been voting for years. But young people often think it's only going to be the presidential candidates on the ballot. Like they’re going to see a ballot with Biden and Trump on it. They don’t realize there are going to be all these other offices and ballot measurers."
The startup has also established partnerships with groups like the Miami Heat, where it creates white labeled, branded websites that show Heat fans where they can go to learn about their ballot and how to vote.
BallotReady has expanded its offerings this year to include more than just information on candidates; it now offers complete guides on the ways to vote, including early voting, ballot drop off boxes and voting by mail.
Compiling information on local candidates in all 50 states, as well as specific municipal and county-level details on how citizens register to vote and how to cast their ballots, is no simple task, Niemczewski explained. The information is often not online, requiring BallotReady's team to send calls and faxes to local governments across the U.S. to hunt down information.
"We got a floppy disk of data recently," Niemczewski said. "It can be very old school."
BallotReady has grown to 70 employees, having raised $4.5 million in venture funding to date. Its backers include InvestHER Ventures, Wakestream Ventures and Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney, and its advisory board is led by David Axelrod, the former chief strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. The startup won the University of Chicago's Social New Venture Challenge in 2015.
Given the pandemic, Niemczewski said the BallotReady team will be completely remote this Election Day. The team will spend the day (and likely the night) on Zoom, which will have a different feel compared to years past.
"It would be so much more fun if we were all together in an office," she said. "I feel very sad that we can’t all be together because [Election Day] feels so exciting."
