Despite Tinder's popularity among young people, presidential
candidates this election season have been reluctant to embrace the
matchmaking app as a campaign tool. But a new spin on the concept,
borrowing the app's signature swipe function, has emerged as a way to
educate and match voters to candidates aligned with the issues they care
about.
Meet Voter, a new app that lets users swipe
right for “yes” and left for “no” on issues just like they would for
potential dates on Tinder. Hunter Scarborough, an entrepreneur in Los
Angeles, and his co-founder Suneil Nyamathi, a programmer, created the
app as a way for people to quickly and easily learn about important
issues facing voters, and discover where candidates stand on
them. Scarborough, 26, said he thinks people should vote based on
stances that align with their own and not solely based on spectacles at
campaign rallies or gaffes on social media.
The app, only available for iOS,
displays yes-or-no questions on issues. Tapping on the card presents a
user with more information, including arguments from both sides. Voter
evaluates user responses with the views of potential presidential
candidates and shows how closely matched you align with each one, on a
percentage scale. Users can also see matches within the Senate and the
House of Representatives, as of an update last week.
“The true purpose of the app is to give you
confidence in your vote,” Scarborough said. “You could match Republican,
and yet match with Hillary Clinton. If someone uses the app right in
front of me, wires get crossed and they ask, ‘How did that happen?’ The
way that candidate stands on the issues, that’s the missing component.”
Voter matches users with presidential, senatorial and gubernatorial hopefuls. Photo: Voter
Less than eight months into its public launch,
the app has drawn 100,000 users. Scarborough prefers to tout a
half-million matches and 25 million questions swiped. That could means
users are, on average, doing the quiz five times or passing their phone
off to friends to take it. Users can also connect to their Facebook
friends on the app and choose to share their results.
Voter is currently pre-revenue, but it is
looking to a revenue model that would include sponsored questions. For
instance, a question on sustainability could be sponsored by an
environmentally focused business or nonprofit organization.
Beyond being a consumer-facing app, Voter is a
trove of data on politicians’ stances. Voter pulls in voting records as
well as statements, speeches and interviews to provide context on the
selected issues. Each component is ranked by an algorithm. For instance,
more-recent votes weigh higher than previous legislative action. Yet,
the correlation to the issue is going to be weaker than someone who
votes consistently.
One presidential candidate has been especially
tricky to map. “[Donald] Trump is interesting because we don’t have a
voting record for him, so we have to listen closely to what he says,”
Scarborough said.
Other politicians, at the local level, have
reached out to Voter on ways to be involved. A candidate in a Senate
race in California agreed to answer all the questions in Voter directly
and rank them as priorities, thereby decreasing the degrees of
separation between the company attempting to evaluate his stances and
his personal views.
Voter has two research associates tasked with
keeping the data up to date, “all day every day,” Scarborough said. He
and Nyamathi are the remaining employees — outside of public relations —
who also work on maintaining the accuracy and building the product.
Considering it has such a small team,
Scarborough said the company has relied on a “very strong advisory
board” of which Tinder CEO and co-founder Sean Rad is a member.
Scarborough and Nyamathi had billed Voter as a “Tinder for politics”
since the beta launch in July and again during the public release in
September. In January, Rad reached out to the team, saying he had seen
them in the press and was interested in building a “mini version of
Voter,” Scarborough said.
Three months later, Tinder released “Swipe the
Vote,” a feature within the dating app that offered 10 issue-based
questions to match users with candidates. That system was empowered by
Voter as well as Wedgies, a social polling platform. Democratic
candidate Bernie Sanders and Republican candidate Ted Cruz had the most
traction in the first day, Digital Trends reported.
No money was exchanged, but Scarborough said
the partnership was worth it for publicity. “Tinder has 10 million daily
users, so we weren’t going to say no to that kind of access, and our
mission statement is to help people become more informed voters,” he
said.
Rad continues to mentor and support
Scarborough as well. "Given that Sean’s time is consumed by Tinder, he
has only been able to serve as an informal adviser to Hunter, but he
does believe the platform has real potential, as the Swipe the Vote
campaign illustrated," Rosette Pambakian, vp of global communications
and branding at Tinder, wrote in an email.
For each question, Voter shows the stance of supporters and the opposition. Photo: Voter
Voter also offers a tab called “Updates” that
pulls from news APIs for select stories on political news. The selection
is not based on the candidates you endorse or stances you take, unlike
on Facebook. “In some ways the idea of making it curated based on the
way you answer the questions is fantastic, but that’s the slippery
slope,” Scarborough said.
Users can also click a link to register the
vote, but Voter’s core mission is not getting people to the polls but
rather keeping them informed.
Now that the latest feature update is
released, the Voter team is looking to pull in revenue. That means
locking down brands for sponsored questions as well as potentially
providing data, which would be anonymized, to paying clients. The
campaign behind one presidential candidate had inquired about accessing
that data early on in Voter’s history, to which Scarborough declined.
Voter also plans to continue adding questions.
The most recent update introduced a question on Syrian refugees and
bodycams on police officers.
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