Facebook investor Sean Parker has a tool that can help voters figure out which candidate to cast their vote for in the upcoming presidential election.
With less than a month to go before Election Day, there are still those who have yet to decide on which of the two presidential candidates is the better choice. But, surely enough, social media has a solution to this predicament.
Brigade, the nonpartisan online network founded by Parker and former Causes President and CEO Matt Mahan, has recently received a major update that features an election tool. This tool uses a conventional digital ballot guide and social media to help people be wiser voters.
According to Yahoo! Tech, Brigade's election tool can serve up personalized recommendations for over 13,000 federal and state polls and ballot propositions. These are mainly based on a Brigade user's social connections with friends, family members, colleagues, and political influencers in their district. Brigade does this by syncing up users' Facebook, email, and phone contacts so that the app can determine which of the users' contacts are also on Brigade.
With the tool, Brigade users can see who people with similar political leanings will be voting for. The tool also asks users if they can pledge to vote in the election and will send them reminders to "get out the vote."
"There's too much at stake in this election to stay home, and yet nearly half of eligible voters will do just that on Nov. 8," Mahan told Yahoo!. "Even worse, half of those who turn out will fail to vote in the critical state and local races that affect their lives even more directly than who sits in the Oval Office. We've built a dead-simple social ballot guide for voters to help each other pledge to vote and ultimately turn out for candidates and ballot props that align with their values."
Brigade launched in 2015 and has since drawn users to take 7 million positions on a wide variety of topics, including religion, civil rights, and environmental issues. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Parker, Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, and tech investor Ron Conway funded a huge chunk of the $9.5 million early funding in Brigade.
