Startup Applies Tinder UI/UX to the Democratic Process

In a political season where it sometimes feels like everybody and their brother has run for the Republican presidential candidacy, Voter, a startup touted as “Tinder for the government,” brings a fresh breeze of simplicity to the decision-making process — on the voter’s end, anyway.

Like any successful iPhone app developer, Voter looked at a pain point in day-to-day life and figured out a way to solve it using a mobile app. The problem: it’s difficult to tell who you should vote for, since candidates go to such great lengths to avoid making their views on the issues clear and consistent. The solution: Voter catalogues all the open government data about candidates and keeps up-to-date databases of which candidates stand for which issues, allowing them to surface candidates for the voting public to consider based on their answers to specific questions about political questions like gun rights, reproductive rights, taxation, and etc.

Spokespersons at the iPhone app startup say their audience is primarily millennials, offering a quick and easy way to determine which candidate is most aligned with their views. There’s sore need for this, given that the only other real solution at this point is either watching hours of on-air interviews, debates, or even worse digging through op-ed pieces online for glimmers of anything resembling a stance on the issues.

To that end, the UI is remarkably simple; like Tinder, users swipe left for no and right for yes. However, instead of signalling interest in a date, they’re signalling their feelings on political issues. Once they’ve provided enough responses the algorithm behind Voter starts to get a picture of what they stand for, allowing for “matches” with the political candidate most aligned with their political stance.

The Los Angeles iPhone app developers behind the app currently have over 24,000 users on the Voter platform, and are actively seeking funding to develop the app as a major contender for engaging millennials in the political process.