Midterm elections are coming up in two weeks, and while many of us have decided who we are voting for, there is a new tool that will help voters who haven’t picked a candidate. It was developed by local students in Maryland and D.C., and it just launched.
When you first log on to Voting Buddy, you fill out five questions about politics. After answering those questions and entering your ZIP code, Voting Buddy allows you to find like-minded candidates in your voting district based on those questions.
Its founder is Dwight Williams, an engineer and former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Voting Buddy is essentially the way that I go about thinking about candidates when I’m trying to make my selection for a political office. And so it seemed to be a tool that I was using just kind of mentally,” Williams told WTOP.
He mentioned it to a few friends, who said he should develop an algorithm that could help other voters. Over the summer, he received a cancer diagnosis and decided to launch the project as he was recovering.
“Then I decided to enlist the support of the students, since I couldn’t do things on my own,” said Williams.
High school students from Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and from St. John’s College High School in D.C. pitched in too, as did college students from local historically Black colleges.
“It’s very much up my alley. I just really want to get involved,” said Malia Magbie, who studies political science at Howard University.
The site was launched just last week and already has users from 45 different states.
Once the quiz is taken, the site outlines general differences between conservative and progressive ideologies and places your views on a left-to-right graph that also measures whether you are an authentic, moderate or centrist conservative or progressive.
It also identifies every incumbent and candidate for every House and Senate seat based upon a user’s ZIP code, as well as that candidate’s position on said graph. It then breaks down how much you align with each candidate down to an exact percentile.
Developers said the site is a great tool for young and first-time voters who may not know an abundance of information about candidates.
“And people who don’t like politics, or just don’t like taking the time for voting, especially people who think of voting as a chore,” said Howard University student Julia Burke, who serves as a Voting Buddy team lead. “It’s a really good, quick, easy tool that they can use to just make it so much more accessible.”
Williams told WTOP that some users were surprised by which candidates actually align with them.
“I found that those people do go to the website and come back and say: ‘Wow. You know, it turns out Voting Buddy had found this candidate for me. I would not have normally looked in that direction,'” said Williams.
While the site is mainly focusing on House and Senate races this election cycle, Williams hopes it will soon expand to local races.
“Of course, all of that needs to be resourced. So hopefully, we’ll be able to find some funding so that we can keep doing the good work,” said Williams. “Because we are committed to remaining ad free.”
Williams said they also hope to develop user communities, user-to-user comparisons and even user-to-celebrity comparisons in the future.
