WeVote - Annual Report 2024

In addition to helping with the Internet Democracy Project and Talk to the City Projects, WeVote also launched a prototype of a direct democracy website full of open source information as part of their grant.

Here are some of their progress metrics taken from their annual report:

1. Launching a Nationwide Direct Democracy Network:

• Legislative Bills: Over 200,000 unique legislative forums covering every bill from Congress and all 50 state legislatures. Each featuring: 
  • AI Summaries - Summaries of legislative bill documents, giving users a high level view of what the bill is for, its potential impacts, and points of contention. 
  • Stakeholder Discussion Feed - If you’re a stakeholder in the outcome of a proposed bill, you have access to participate in the community feed. 
  • Resources - Additional documents, links, vote history, amendments and more to give added relevant information to users. 
  • Voting - Verified users who are stakeholders in the bill have voting rights.  Users can vote Yes, or No, but also they can ‘?’, which prompts the user to ask the community a question they have that is preventing them from making a yes or no decision.  
• Representative Profiles: Over 8,000 unique representative profiles covering every legislator in all 50 states and Congress.  Each featuring: 
  • Bill and Activity Feed - A feed of all the representative voting history, and any official activities. 
  • Index of Sponsored Legislation - A tab on their profile that shows all the bills they have sponsored or co-sponsored, with links to the unique bill page. 
  • Bio Section - Representative biographical information.  Default populated through AI and API feeds, representatives can log in and update their profile if so desired. 
  • Rep Q&A - Constituents and stakeholders of the representative’s voting decisions are allowed to ask public questions, as well as vote on or comment on other user questions. 

2. Validating Users as Real Registered Voters:

• We’ve activated voter verification functionality across fourteen states opening up the platform to over 80 million voters. 
• Likewise, representatives can validate their status as a real representative in these states and participate in direct constituent engagement.

3. Volunteers, Partnerships & Activities:

• WeVote is fortunate to have a team of passionate volunteers contributing to the development and design of our innovative civic platform.  We wouldn’t exist without them. 
• Free and Equal Debates Foundation collaborated with WeVote on building the future of live debate viewer engagement for their presidential debate series.  We look forward to continuing this relationship into 2025 and beyond. 
• Congressional Candidates, Party Directors, Advocacy Organizations and State Legislators have given us tremendous feedback and have shown strong enthusiasm to participate and support our growing community. 

4. Key Metrics:

Site activity mostly constituted our visitors researching legislative activities through organic search and word of mouth. We had some impressive numbers from organic traffic which included: 

• Visitors - 4,100
• Page Views - 17,000
• Actions - 58,000

5. New Features:

• New ‘My Ballot’ Feature allows voters to participate in constituents forums directly with each other and their candidates.  
• TrueCount is a professional dashboard feature that allows representatives and their staff to connect with their constituents and other stakeholders in our verified forums.  This tool  is a game changer for constituent relationship management.