FAQ

Simply click the “Join” button at the top of the Elect435  screen and answer a few brief questions. Once your account is confirmed,  you will see a “My Portfolio” icon at the top of the Elect435  screen. Now you can easily add and remove the candidates of your choice -- right from their Profile cards -- to your personalized Portfolio. A Portfolio allows you to track your candidates and support them: financially, by volunteering your time, or both.

Elect435 provides short biographies for each candidate. The bios are all produced in house, and are compiled from the candidate’s website, Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, and reputable 3rd party sources including VoteSmart, Govtrack, and others.

Candidates are required to file their financial disclosures with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) at the end of each fiscal quarter.  The FEC updates their publically available data 30 days after the close of each quarter. We update our profiles based on those data as soon as they are available.  

The gun safety rating is based the National Rifle Association rating posted by VoteSmart (www.VoteSmart.com).  

All ratings are presented on a score of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most progressive and 1 is the most conservative position.  Ratings are only available for incumbent candidates, as they are based on the politician’s actions while in office.

Yes, absolutely!  This is very important to us.   All campaign donations made through Elect435 are subject to FEC campaign finance rules, which requires candidates to track names, address, and employers of all donors.  That’s why we ask you for that information when you create an account on Elect435.

For purposes of campaign finance regulation, donations made through Elect435  are direct donations from the donor to the candidate.

When you click the “Donate” button, your donation request goes directly to Democracy Engine.  If the candidate has set up direct deposit with Democracy Engine, their office should receive your donation within 24 hours.  If the candidate has not set up direct deposit with Democracy Engine, their office will receive a check in the mail for the amount of your donation.

Please feel free to refer to the Democracy Engine website for further detail.

We are so glad you asked.  You will be able to shortly.  We want to make that capability available as soon as possible.  It is not implemented just yet.

The minimum donation to any individual candidate is $5.  The minimum transaction is $10, so if you want to donate $5 to one candidate this is your chance to choose one more that is worthy of your attention.

We love the small donations!  Every little bit counts. What we may lack in volume, we hope to make up in quantity.  Please invite all your friends to donate to your portfolio as well!

Elect435 provides profiles of all candidates running for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.   We provide our service in support of electing candidates who will advance an agenda that better represents all of us, and those are the candidates that you can contribute to on this site.

When you donate to a portfolio of candidates, your donation is automatically split up into individual donations to each of your candidates in the amounts you specify.  This is to be sure that your donation complies with Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulations.

While you only have to enter your information once, you are actually making multiple contributions which will be presented as such on your credit card statement.

Our volunteers do their best to keep our data current and accurate, so we appreciate your alerting us if you do see something that is questionable. Please email us at data@elect435.org.   We will research and attempt to rectify the error as soon as we can.

Elect435 is an innovative electoral tool that provides “one-stop shopping” for comprehensive information on all U.S. House of Representatives candidates in the 2018 midterms. Finding candidates you are excited to support -- based on the criteria that matter most to you -- is as simple as “point-and-click.”

Looking for candidates in a certain geographic region or a specific state? Are you most interested in supporting candidates with a specific demographic profile? Or are you intent on finding candidates who champion issues that you care the most about, like the environment or gun safety? Elect435 makes it easy to search for candidates based on multiple filters, add and track your dream candidates in your own personalized portfolio (just like a stock portfolio),  and support these candidates, financially and by volunteering your time.

Elect435 was founded by a team of concerned citizens-turned-activists after the 2016 elections.  We met through grassroots groups popping up in our communities and concluded that if we truly wanted to improve the quality of government, we needed to change who represented us in Congress.

We are researchers and analysts by training, so we researched the candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives in the November midterms, not just in our own district, but across the country, and then created the tools that allowed us to analyze races and candidates. We used these tools to help our groups select candidates to support and we decided we should make these tools and data available for everyone. We believe knowledge is power, and we wanted to put that power in the hands of activists across the country so they could extend their political impact beyond their own backyards.

We are united in the fervent desire to restore our democracy by building 21st century tools to educate citizens about these candidates and enable them to choose those who will represent all of us.

Founders:

Michelle Olson

Michelle Olson founded Elect435 out of her fervent belief that the current direction of the U.S. Congress must be changed. She co-founded Minuteman Indivisible and is one of the lead organizers of the Indivisible MA coalition.  Her focus has been on the 2018 electoral strategy, including statewide electoral strategies workshops and working with other groups in developing their electoral efforts. Michelle is a former Wall Street analyst and entrepreneur, with an MBA from the MIT Sloan School.

Rina Schneur

Rina Schnuer manages the data and content. She is the research lead at Minuteman Indivisible and launched a Moms Demand Action for Gun Safety group in 2017. Rina is a Data Scientist, was a director of Business Analytics at Verizon, and co-founded Emptoris, Inc. She is the former president of Informs, an analytics professional organization.  She holds an MSc and PhD from MIT.

Elect435  is unique: there is no other electoral tool available that provides such an in-depth, standardized look at all the U.S. House of Representatives candidates in the 2018 midterms.  

We designed Elect435 with the activist in mind, and Elect435 allows you to easily identify -- and support -- candidates who champion your specific values. Elect435 is the great equalizer: no longer do blue state activists have to sit on the sidelines and wish for a congress that supports an  agenda that represents all of us. Instead, Elect435  gives you the power to easily assemble, support, and track your own “Fantasy Congress” portfolio and gives you the tools to make that fantasy our reality.

No. Elect435 is an electoral software tool that enables activists to find and support candidates who align with their values. A.C.T. Software, the benefit corporation that developed and maintains Elect435 , does not make political donations. It is not a PAC.

While Elect435 is not a “partisan organization,” it definitely has progressive roots.  Elect435 was founded by a team of concerned citizens, and grew out of the Indivisible movement in Lexington, MA after the 2016 elections.  Its founders recognized that the problems we face go beyond Trump: our system of representative government is flawed and needs the involvement of citizens across the country to provide resources to the best candidates who will represent the citizenry at large versus special interests that have been pouring money into campaigns.   

These special interests have large resources to research and support candidates,  so we need a tool that levels the playing field and allows the individual citizen to throw his or her support into the political arena -- equally and just as easily. Although we are progressive, we are strictly not affiliated with the Democratic party or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).

Please do!  We are working on adding capabilities to support this even as we speak.

Our plan is let you create a group and invite others to the group, so you can all support a shared portfolio of candidates.  Stay tuned.