VoteGopher

For those of us who've been tearing our hair out trying to keep track of what our politicians believe in order to make an informed voting decision, VoteGopher.com has been nothing short of a godsend. The brainchild of rising Harvard senior Will Ruben '09, VoteGopher was the Grand Prize winner in this year's i3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge. The site provides visitors with a comprehensive, yet simple set of tools to research all of the main candidates' stances on...just about everything. For each of 16 major political issues, from healthcare to foreign policy, the website provides a clear and concise "Issue Summary", as well as a summary of each major candidate's stances and voting record on the issue. It probably sounds like a daunting task to make that much information (with news articles, videos, quotes, etc. thrown in for good measure) easy to navigate and interpret, and indeed, this has been the main failing of ambitious political summary sites in the past. But this is precisely VoteGopher's strength: with excellent design and some very clever features (such as the ability to compare several candidates' stances on an issue side by side), the site makes the election start to look simple. The VoteGopher team have gotten a ton of great press these past months (from the NYTimes and Washington Post, for starters), and we can expect things to continue to ramp up as November approaches. With the buzz it's generating, VoteGopher.com may be set to position itself as the go-to online resource for election questions.Continue Reading...