There are nearly 520,000 elected offices nationwide — and a huge portion of them go uncontested, according to local election tech startup Empowered to Run.
"A lot of people just don't realize how many [elected seats] there are because they're mostly thinking about the federal level," said the company's founder and Executive Director Steve Sinha. "Most are uncontested or only nominally contested ... and even those seats that are contested are, again, only barely contested, and many of the contestants are not particularly good candidates."
Sinha said that for every one person running for office, there are around four others interested in running, but don't because they self-assess as unprepared.
He's on a mission to change that, through his young non-partisan political tech venture. After spending a lot of time on the Obama '08 campaign trail, Sinha said he noticed an opportunity to train volunteers not just in how to organize and engage their own communities, but in how to actually run for local offices themselves.
"We want to empower people rooted in basic progressive values to run for state and local office successfully and to govern effectively, and [we want to do it] at large scale," he said.
Empowered to Run offers prospective candidates online tools to help them decide if they want to run for local offices, and then prepare to do so.
Think Coursera, but for running for office.
Sinha committed to the company full time about a year ago, and has since developed a team of 10 people, working on tech and design. They joined local social entrepreneurship accelerator SeedSpot's inaugural D.C. cohort back in April. Because he's in the process of filing for non-profit status, the company hasn't yet been allowed to raise funds, but Sinha hopes to start raising money in the next month or so.
The online platform will gauge each individual's needs through what Sinha called their "digital Road Map tool".
"If someone is interested in running for city council, for example, they could come to our site, we'll ask them a series of questions to understand a bit better where they are in the process of running — they may come in and say, 'We know exactly the seat we're looking for', and just be looking for a better understanding of the process of running," Sinha said. "[Or] they may come in at an early stage and be interested in running, but not know exactly what seat they're interested in."
Based on the candidate's Road Map results, they'll offer a customized set of training steps, like a module that facilitates the thought process behind deciding to run, or another that might address some of the policy issues specific to the individual's prospective seat and town.
"After that, you may be at the stage of being ready to file and run, so we'd move to you to the resource facilitation apparatus, and connect you with some of the donors out there who may be interested in supporting you," Sinha said.
As they prepare to open funding rounds, Sinha said they're focusing on building relationships with prospective donors and designing a human-centered platform that'll help serve their mission: engaging and organizing stronger candidates to run for state legislative offices and lower.
"We're lucky that there's been a civic awakening [after the last election cycle]. A lot of people have been called to this mission," he said. "We've seen significant new communities of people coming out of the woodwork who were more focused on their day-to-day tech and design jobs, and weren't really thinking about politics until the recent election."
It's an underserved market, Sinha said. Whereas most companies in the political tech landscape will focus on the election itself, Empowered to Run focuses on what he calls "the journey in thinking about running."
"We're really serving the needs of the candidate," he said. "And understanding the pains and challenges that the candidate [might] go through, and then addressing those things. ... The critical thing is that with 520,000 elected offices, there's a variety of paths people can take. But we think that by creating a centralized resource with a lot of different aspects to it, we can empower people through a pathway that's well-suited to their specific needs."
Image used via CC BY-SA 3.0 - Credit Emw
