It's time to vote! Now, how do you decide who to vote for?

Glen Nelson Center is supporting a partnership between Minnesota Public Radio News and the digital startup Populist to create a new kind of sample election ballot.

It’s a situation that has confronted nearly every voter - you step up to the ballot box, review the list of candidates and mutter silently (or perhaps out loud) “uh oh… who are these people?” You have become the dreaded uninformed voter.

The U.S. electorate is energized heading into the 2022 midterms. According to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll fully eight out of ten voters are “definitely voting” in the midterms this year. What remains unanswered is how much time voters will spend researching candidates ahead of election day.

This is why Glen Nelson Center funded an experiment pairing MPR News with Populist, a Colorado-based tech startup building digital applications on transparently sourced data, to create a new kind of sample ballot. The public beta is both a proof of concept for Populist and an opportunity for MPR News to provide additional election tools to its 400,000+ monthly listeners.

Although we live in the Information Age, it can be maddeningly difficult to research political candidates. Populist offers a modern interface that pulls together political candidate data from the federal level all the way down to local school board races. Voters can research who's on their ballot and create easily shareable voting guides based on information like endorsements, financial data, social media channels, biographies, and more. By simplifying the research process and allowing voters to tap into networked knowledge, Populist makes informed voting easier.

"It's the responsibility of tech to be transparent,” said Henry Lai, co-founder + design director at Populist. “You have to respect the user's intelligence and give them the tools to be critical. Clear, trustworthy, easy-to-access civic information is the first step in getting people to care and engage"

This is also an experiment for Glen Nelson Center - funding a small-scale “try-it” project that connects a promising startup with a team inside American Public Media Group. It is an opportunity for Populist to build a digital product that could be sold to other media outlets throughout the country, as well as a chance for Glen Nelson Center to gain insight into the startup as we consider making a future investment. Watch your inbox for news about other experiments already underway.

Make sure to vote next week - and become an informed voter before you hit the ballot box!