Fam, I have a confession to make: I didn’t vote in 2016.

Like many of you, the 2016 election and the days afterward left me shook. And for me, those days were especially difficult—I was living my best black life outside the country, devoting my energy, skills, and talents to working abroad. Sure, the #travelnoire posts on IG were everything, but at home, Donald Trump had been elected president. And I was doing nothing about it.

So, after nearly three years away, I came home. I joined a small team of geeks formerly with Google, Amazon, and the Obama White House—basically, an unfair share of the world’s smartest people—to build what I’m calling a new superpower that all of us can use to fight back and make a difference.

Unlike what Kanye says about the power he feels when he wears his Make America Great Again hat… this is, in fact, a real superpower. It’s an app called VoteWithMe.

Got a smartphone? Then you got the power. Using public data, VoteWithMe shows you which of your friends need a reminder to get out to vote. It shows you which friends can/should vote in swing districts with tight races. And it shows you who didn’t vote in 2014 and 2016. Mmhmm, that tea is still hot.

But most importantly, VoteWithMe makes it easy to send those friends (and cousins, and colleagues, and former baes) a simple text message to remind them to show up to the polls in this year’s midterm elections.

We've done all the math and hard science on it and here's what we know: reaching out to people you already know is up to 20x more effective than traditional get out the vote tactics, like knocking on strangers’ doors.

VoteWithMe is 100% free. And simply put, after voting yourself, it’s the single best thing you can do to make a difference in this year’s midterm elections on November 6th (apart from stumbling upon a stockpile of vibranium).

I don’t want you to feel the way I did last time after Election Day. The most exciting thing about 2018 is that we’ve got a real chance to make sure all of you do what I didn’t in 2016—vote. And this time, with our new VoteWithMe superpower, it’s easy to make sure we bring all of our people with us, too.

VoteWithMe is free to download and use. It's available now on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

Chris Scott

Writing since October 2018 · 1 story contributed