Swanee Golden ’19 Is Making Civic Engagement Accessible With VoteSee

Swanee Golden ’19’s political awareness began on the drive to school each morning, listening to the news on NPR. “I always thought of elections as a really joyous and exciting thing, and I couldn’t wait for my first opportunity to vote and to be more engaged,” Golden says.

Coming from a household where she was surrounded by political media, Golden wanted to lower the barriers to political engagement for others. Today, Golden is the founder and CEO of VoteSee, an online platform that makes voter information about congressional representatives more accessible. VoteSee went live in September, just in time for the 2024 election.

“We wanted to make something that would help people feel empowered as they head to the voting booth in November,” Golden says.

After graduating with a degree in politics from Princeton, Golden worked at Google, first in marketing and then on the Social Impact Partnerships team, ensuring that Google search results about politicians, candidates, and elections were accurate and as nonpartisan as possible.

Golden is now a graduate student at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, where her idea for VoteSee emerged at the intersection of her studies in entrepreneurship and politics. “It’s an idea that I had in my mind mostly because I thought it was exceedingly difficult to get information on how elected officials in Congress were voting,” Golden says. Even though data on representatives’ voting records is publicly available, it can often be challenging to parse.

Golden and her team of fellow Harvard graduate students interviewed policy experts through the Kennedy School as well as average American voters. They used the insights from those interviews, polling data, and media coverage to decide which issues to feature on the VoteSee website.

VoteSee gathers data from Congress.gov and, through several AI models, synthesizes the data to present how representatives vote on 20 different issues. Based on their research and analysis, the team gives the AI models parameters of what it means to be liberal or conservative on various issues. On the website, users can search a representative by name to see their voting record displayed on a spectrum from liberal to conservative on these topics. Those who aren’t sure where to start can also type in their state to see a list of their representatives. The site offers quizzes to help users understand how their own views align with those of their representatives.

It was important to Golden that VoteSee be nonpartisan. “When I thought about where there is a gap in terms of the offerings that are available to people, the nonpartisan space is where I saw the biggest gap,” she says.

As the 2024 election approaches, Golden recognizes that simply encouraging people to vote may not be enough. “If it’s challenging to get enough information to have a comfortable conversation about politics, it’s also probably challenging to go vote,” she says. “This work has helped me understand that there is a lot more that goes into feeling informed and empowered enough to be a voter even if you have that right.”