The startup aims to simplify a popular electoral trend: preferential voting

Priority voting (currently used in more than 50 cities in the United States, as well as the states of Maine and Alaska) is an electoral reform that allows people to rank multiple choices in the order in which they prefer them, in order to find the options. which are most acceptable to all. The idea is to provide an alternative to choosing the largest faction. Preferential voting appeared on ballots in ten jurisdictions in 2022 and won in eight, including Nevada.

One of the factors that has kept this method from being more widely used is technology. The voting booths have not been set up for this.

Now, a young startup called ClasséVote offers software-as-a-service technology to simplify the decision-making process through online ranked voting. The program was used by New York City when the municipality first used ranked ballot, after an official discovered the company's website, and it was used by the Elections Division of Alaska to educate its voters.

Founder Tad Milbourn, based in Middleton, WI, compares the software to Survey Monkey, if he were just voting by ranking. He founded the startup as a side hustle while working at Intuit. During the pandemic lockdowns, he trained in coding and created the software. The one-man business, incorporated in 2020, currently brings in around $28,000 a year. It served 22,906 users and 424,189 voters.

Millbourn thinks turnover could increase significantly if ranked voting becomes widespread. "For it to be used in the mainstream, it has to be used in everyday contexts," he explains.

He's keeping tabs on what's happening now that the November elections have taken place. “It will be interesting to see how much of this activity correlates with interest in elections in general,” he says.

It's not just elections where ranked voting can be used, he adds. It has been used by companies trying to take the pulse of employees and to screen nonprofits supported by a company's charitable arm. A video game studio, Studio Wildcard, used it to contact its community to decide which character to include in a future version of the game, he says.

“It has very broad applicability,” he says. "Anytime you have a group where everyone's voice is more or less equal, it's a great place to use ranked voting as a decision-making tool."

Milbourn previously co-founded Payable, a venture-backed startup that offered a mass payments platform, and served as CEO for four years, before being acquired by payment processor Stripe. He's also a veteran of Intuit, where he led innovation teams that revamped the culture.

"I was at the forefront of entrepreneurship in the United States thanks to Intuit," he says. “I have always been intrigued by entrepreneurship as a means of self-expression. After the acquisition of my startup, I asked myself: “Can I have my cake and eat it too? Can I design a setup where my job is fulfilling, learning new things, and having the kind of lifestyle I want with my wife and family? Can it also promote and advance the causes I care about? “I'm not there yet, but I would say that the first results are super encouraging. »