New website to help voters research their ballot

All right, it's 46 minutes after the hour. Election day just 19 days away and the clock is ticking for voters to make their selections while voter guides are mailed out in advance. Many voters wait until the very last minute to make their decisions. But there is an app that is making it easy to compare candidates and propositions. So joining us now to talk about the Open Ballot app is Rose Blumen, the co-founder of Open Ballot. Good morning to you, Rose. Thanks for joining us. Good morning. Thanks for having me. All right. So I was just jokingly saying the ballot sits, you know, on your countertop and then you open it. It's just got a list of stuff there. Is that what prompted you to create this Open Ballot app? Exactly. It's that feeling that you open it. It's four pages. It's overwhelming, right? There's a lot going on. And me and five of my friends, we thought there's got to be a better way. And we made Open Ballot. So this is able to digest all that information down to make it easier for you to go through. Tell us what it does. That's right. So on openballot.app, you can see all of your favorite voter guides side by side so you can compare them. You can do deep dives, learn about the issues and vote according to your values. All right. So and then the propositions as well. It's also got that broken down. And is it because the one that you get from the elections office is so long, does this condense everything down for you? Is that kind of the idea? That's right. That you you mean the phone book? Yeah, it's essentially a phone book. I mean, I could hurt someone with that. Exactly. We have all the propositions, all the races, everything in California. And if you're in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego, we have all the local issues too. So what makes what you have declutter what is on the pages that are sent to you? What is it the app does specifically that condenses everything down? Well, what I find really helps me is to follow voter guides that I trust and also voter guides that maybe I'm not as excited about. So this is like the local paper, the Democratic and Republican parties guides, nonpartisan guides. We have all those guides on the platform. You can add your favorites and see them side by side instead of having six browser tabs open. I got you. So right now, the way you have to go to each of these different things separately, but the way that you have it set up, It's side by side. So you'll have the opinions of like the League of Women Voters or like, you know, what they're saying about about each of these things side by side before you make your decision. That's right. You can read about the proposition and you can also see all the recommendations. We have over 200 voter guides and I'm sure you will recognize many of them. So is it is it good? But is it so compact that you can't read it? Like, how does it how does it is it made simple? I mean, you know what it's like to be dealing with this. So I'm sure you put some thought into that. Describe that for us. Exactly. So we've made it very simple and easy. You go to openballot.app. You don't have to log in or do anything like that. Right away, you'll see some of the top voter guides side by side and who their recommendations are. You can click in and read more. Or, you know, a lot of people are voting in the last 20 minutes on the last day. You can scroll down and see the recommendations, and I promise that it will help you vote so much quicker. You said this is a nonpartisan effort. You don't want to influence anyone in any particular direction? That's right. So it's free and nonpartisan, so we have all the voter guides across the political spectrum. So it's free. What is the benefit to you for this? Well, so I started this with five friends, and we're mostly volunteers. years. And we're doing this because we believe that all voters should have information at their fingertips and that it can be easier to vote than it is now. So you're very civic minded. You just wanted to make it a little bit easier and less, you know, less cumbersome for the average person like yourself. And for ourselves. Yeah, for yourself as well. Wow. Very cool. So open ballot, the app, and it's an app and a website as well. It's a website. It's a website. Open ballot dot app that app okay open ballot open ballot dot app uh Rose Bluman check it out uh she's very civic minded that is what that is the reason behind this that she's not trying to take anything from you and it is free to use and we all could use something like this to break all of that stuff down into one nice chunk to read easy to read Rose, thank you so much for joining us this morning, thanks for having me, it's very civic-minded and hopefully a lot of people find you know a great use of of your app, appreciate it, all right