Empowered Vote is a non-partisan nonprofit trying to build tools that help people with civic engagement. Our tools aim to help you see who's running, where they stand, where the money goes, and learn more about our governments in the process. We're early, and we don't have all the answers yet. People before parties. No ads. No selling your data.
Three problems we keep running into as voters ourselves. We don't claim to have solved any of them — we're sharing what we see and what we're trying.
Figuring out who represents you, where they stand, and what your local budget actually does shouldn't take a weekend of research. Most people don't have that time, so they don't bother — and we don't blame them.
Pull the scattered pieces — representatives, votes, budgets, meetings — into one place a voter can actually use. We're not there yet.
Party, name, network — we react to those before we read what was actually said. That's human, but it makes it almost impossible to evaluate ideas on their merits.
Build tools (like Read & Rank and Compass) that show you the idea before the name attached to it, so you can make up your own mind first.
Government data exists, but it's locked inside PDFs, slow portals, and meeting minutes nobody reads. The institutions that produce it aren't set up to make it usable.
Present what's already public in formats a voter can read in a few minutes — without dumbing down what it actually says.
A few of these tools share data with each other where it makes sense — for example, calibrating your Compass carries over to Essentials. Most of them still stand on their own, and connections between them are a work in progress. Some are further along than others. Click through to try them.
Rank where you stand on key issues, then compare your compass to politicians on the same scale.
Open Compass →Enter your address and see who actually represents you, where their campaign contributions come from, and other information.
Open Essentials →Read short, deidentified political quotes and rank what you actually agree with — judgment before identity.
Open Read & Rank →Explore municipal budgets line by line. See what your city actually spends and how it compares year over year.
Open Treasury Tracker →Bite-sized learning modules on different areas of government and the issues behind the headlines.
Open Badges →Test what you know about civics in a friendly, competitive trivia format.
Open Trivia →Empowered Vote is a tiny part-time team. We'd rather be transparent about the tradeoffs than pretend we're further along than we are.
Things will break. Data will be incomplete or wrong in places. Don't make a final voting decision based only on what you see here — cross-check with official sources, candidate sites, and your local election office.
Found a bug or a wrong fact? Flag it for us — that's the most useful thing you can do during alpha.
A handful of people — mostly non-developers — build this in evenings and weekends. That's why progress is uneven and some features are further along than others. We're prioritizing breadth over polish on purpose right now: better to ship something useful and iterate than wait years for perfect.
AI tools have made it possible for our non-developer core team to ship real software, and we're grateful for that. But AI gets things wrong, and we know not everyone is comfortable with its use in civic work.
We do our best to vet what AI helps produce, but a small team working late nights doesn't catch everything. If you spot something off, flag it and we'll fix it.
We try to keep finances open. See our current funding and spend at financials.empowered.vote.
Three short talks on what we're trying to build and why. They're a few months old — some details have moved, the thinking hasn't.
