About Alignvote™
Create Voters Guides Easily
With Alignvote, your civic or media organization can easily create Voters Guide matchmaking quizzes.
It's too hard for voters to find their candidate.
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.
Alignvote is a survey-creation platform, like Survey Monkey or Google Forms, but the end-product is a voter-candidate matchmaking quiz for any election you want. 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.
Target Customers
For civic and political 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.
Goals
Alignvote is about transparency. We want to make it easier for voters to know where candidates stand, regardless of their positions or parties.
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.