ElectNext CEO and Princeton grad Keya Dannenbaum: smarter voters make smarter communities

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods program, the capstone class for the Temple’s Department of Journalism.

Too many voters feel overwhelmed or unprepared to cast ballots on Election Day, so they either choose candidates randomly or never vote at all.

This was Keya Dannenbaum’s concern that fueled the idea behind ElectNext, a startup that was formally launched at the TEDx Philly event Tuesday at the Performing Arts Center at Temple University. Technically Philly first told you about the DreamIt Ventures startup, but now that the dust has finally settled on Philadelphia’s latest municipal election, we thought it worth hearing more.

Featured by TechCrunch and NewsWorks, ElectNext is a website-based matching platform that helps voters vote well down their ballot.

“People go out to vote, and they know who they want for president, or whoever is at the top of the ticket, but they walk into that ballot booth and they are confronted with a ballot three pages long, filled with people and offices they have never heard of,” said Dannenbaum, the startup’s CEO and founder.

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Philly election results look a bit friendlier in Google charts

Graph of City Council election results.

A rare feat of turnover in a Philadelphia municipal election Tuesday led to a visit or two to the unofficial online results that are updated by the City Commissioner’s office.

One developer decided to visualize the results, if only in the most basic fashion: Google charts. But Technically Philly has to point out that Joseph Russell, 27, is barking up the wrong tree.

See his basic charts here.

The one major citywide race he didn’t chart? The city commissioners and, well, yesterday’s election brought in two new faces to the board — Democrat Stephanie Singer and Republican Al Schmidt — both of whom have expressed interest in drastically updating that office’s web presence, through realtime data and visualizations. Make it happen.

Russell, a Rowan University alumnus who grew up in South Jersey, actually lives in Massachusetts, where he moved in 2009 with his girlfriend who took a job in Watertown. He works for Lycos on the WYSIWYG site editor at Tripod.com, but Philly and civic web work still have his heart.