STRAW

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  STRAW

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  Log In

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  Find your Voting District

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  Profile

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  Feed

Inspiration

It is well known that many elections, especially local and state elections, can have voter turnouts below 20% of those that are eligible to vote. Additionally, most constituents lack easy access to concise and direct information about candidates. We built STRAW to increase transparency between the US’s numerous elections, politicians who are running, and the general public.

What it does

STRAW effortlessly combines election information with a social media platform for both voters and politicians. Voters only need their home address to access, save, and set notifications for all elections, politicians on the ballot, and polling locations. Each politician creates a concise profile covering their most important platforms and stances (less than 300 words, 2 min read).

STRAW also functions as a cohesive social media platform where politicians are able to create short posts, and can only be upvoted or downvoted by all users on the app. These functions cancel the noise commonly seen in political arguments on other platforms. In turn, STRAW intends to promote #trending local politicians with interesting ideas to the national stage.

Users have the ability to curate their feed by following their favorite politicians, hashtags, and friends’ upvote/downvote activity.

How I built it

We used Firebase as our database to handle user authentication and store user data. We used Swift and the xcode developer environment to create the app, and we used Figma for the UI/UX designs.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into several challenges while building STRAW. Coming in with relatively little experience in development, we decided to prioritize creating a viable idea and fleshing out the overall user experience. For example, in the ideation phase, we had trouble deciding the precise mission of our tool, weighing how exactly to balance the interaction available to voters and politicians. After attending the Google Chrome Products presentation, we also had difficulty in incorporating Firebase into our system.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were proud of our ability to work in a team and practice our skills in programs we were not completely familiar with.

What I learned

We learned how to code in Swift, utilize Firebase, and create an interactive UX with Figma.

What's next for STRAW

We want to implement a way to fact check posts politicians make, especially if they contain information such as statistics. Our software would ideally take key wording from posts and crosscheck them with databases of peer-reviewed research papers.

STRAW could also be expanded to become more usable by allowing users to create their own elections for non-governmental organizations. This would improve its user retainment.

Built With

• figma
• firebase
• swift