Everyvote.org is developing and providing software that makes it easy to know your candidates, their views, and others’ views about them, all collected in one place for easy access.

Goals

1) Establish in the nearest possible future a reliable, comprehensive United States candidate database, that anyone can freely integrate into their own website. This database would list the names and basic identifying information (like party, contact info) all of your officially registered candidates for every election you are eligible to vote in, including the federal, state, county, and local level elections. It would also provide the names and contact information for all judges you are eligible to cast a retention vote on. This database would enable websites to show you every candidate for every election you are eligible to vote in, all on a single page.

2) Help create and participate in a federated opinion sharing platform (OSP) network. Today, if you vote to Support a bill on OpenCongress, you need to resubmit that same vote if you later use a site like POPVOX. If you declare on ISideWith that you are Pro-Life and in favor of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, you will have to resubmit those same stances again if you later use LoveGov. It would save you time and energy if you could submit these decisions one time, and submit your profile information just one time, and then have them transferred to any other site that tracks this same information. That’s exactly what OSP federation would allow you to do. In order to make OSP federation possible, OSPs like OpenCongress, POPVOX, ISideWith, LoveGov, and the proposed EveryVote.org platform would need to agree to identical open standards, which ensure our data is transferable and cross-compatible.

For now, a facebook app, intended to make student government elections more transparent and more interesting, is being launched. But the intention is to bring this into the actual political arena to help potential voters know their candidates and to see what they are all about.

Open source – All EveryVote.org software will be provided under the Affero General Public License version 3. This license allows anyone to use, download, and modify EveryVote.org software, as long as they agree to let others download their modifications of the software. The reason for selecting the AGPLv3 open source license instead of the MIT License, an open source license which would not require developers to make their modifications available to the public, is to support a culture of sharing and mutual benefit.