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Votable app thumbnail
Inspiration
Votable was inspired by what our team saw as a deeply inequitable divide in access and participation in local elections. These elections are the ones that impact voters most personally, determining restrictions on land use and how schools are run. However, they are the ones that receive the least attention. If we, as a country, are to pride ourselves on democracy, then these discrepancies are unacceptable. Thus, Votable sets out to bridge that divide and bring equal access to all elections, increasing civic engagement and creating a more perfect union.
What it does
Votable is a dashboard for voters. The home page provides quick access to all parts of the app, giving users a highlight of what they need to know to be prepared for voting day. The main part of the app is contained within the middle sub-menu, where the first screen is the elections page. This page provides information about past, present, and future elections. It shows results from past elections and winners in your district, and those who will appear in upcoming elections. The Learn page contains resources to inform voters about the voting process and ways to better participate in democracy as a whole in their communities. The News page provides links to news sites that are relevant to voters geographically, concerning local, state, and national events.
How we built it
Votable was built using React Native and Expo. The main development environment used was Visual Studio Code, and Git served as our version control base.
Challenges we ran into
Initially, we had intended to use Material UI, a popular React library, to supply our individual components. However, only after switching from testing on the Web to testing on real hardware did we find that Material UI is a web-only framework, and we needed to seek out a replacement. NativeBase served this purpose very well. Also, collaborating effectively proved to be a bit of a snag. Coding together wasn’t as simple as a synchronous system like Google Docs. We learned to use Git, an industry standard version control system, to work together. As a team, we developed greatly during the development of Votable. We frequently had disagreements on the branding side of the app, and had to learn to better resolve those conflicts in a timely and mutually beneficial manner. We also became handy with our calendars, setting deadlines and holding each other accountable in order to keep the development process going.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Planning and creating what we hope to be a viable solution to one of America’s deepest issues is incredibly rewarding. Ultimately, this kind of praxis is of paramount importance when it comes to addressing systemic problems. We can’t fix electoralism’s problems with electoralism, and we believe that the building of a resource like Votable is a good first step. Beyond this, seeing a project of this scope and magnitude through to the end, with so many moving parts, has been a reward all on its own. Each of us has made substantial improvement as programmers, designers, writers, and leaders -- boons that will no doubt enable us to do even better things in the future.
What we learned
Working on Votable has taught us all a great deal about app development, but more generally about working as a team and working with deadlines. We know better how to ration our time wisely, and cut our losses when things need to move on. We are more comfortable with communicating our ideas through brainstorming sessions, and are able to speak up when we disagree. The interplay of agreement and disagreement fostered the best ideas in our team. Finally, we are more informed about the realities of the voting process, and the work that still needs to be done in this civic space.
What's next for Votable
Ultimately, the app we are proud to present today is still a rough draft. Continued development on Votable would help polish the app’s look and complete its feature set. The main priority is setting up detailed election pages for each individual race, with more specific information for each candidate. We would also like to set up a wizard to guide users through these somewhat daunting lists, in order to make all races on the ballot as accessible as possible. In the future, we would like to lean further into the improvement of community outreach and activism by providing a dedicated menu tab to those activities. Plus, we would include a space for users to contribute their own ideas and updates to the information in the app. For final deployment, we would also like to connect to a real backend database and adapt the app’s content to user’s locations.
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