Harvard Senior Aims to ‘Demystify’ The Ballot with New Voter Resource

Growing up just outside of Washington, D.C., politics was a fact of life for Lauren A. Perl ’25 — but the facts of politics remained inaccessible for too many of her neighbors.

“I aimed to demystify this process,” she said.

In May, Perl revived an idea she’s had since high school to create a tool to help inform voters about the races and candidates in their area. Her idea eventually became BallotWise, a non-partisan civic engagement platform that launched in September.

BallotWise helps undecided voters create personalized voting plans by describing candidates’ preferences on legislation. Perl said she was inspired to create the resource while participating in her local congressional representative’s political education program.

“People had no clue who best supported their values, and they trusted me as somebody who’s from their community, who knew their values, to help them find the candidates that made the most sense for them,” she said.

Perl created the platform alongside two co founders, Logan Delavan-Hoover — who graduated from University of Maryland earlier this year — and Ayyub Abdulrezak, a senior at MIT. Delavan-Hoover serves as BallotWise’s co-executive director, while Abdulrezak serves as chief technical officer.

BallotWise spotlights political candidates’ legislative actions to ensure that voters can understand how they’re being represented.

When users input their ZIP code into the website, Perl said they can view the races from “White House down to state house” and can see information about each candidate’s voting records on the ten issues that the New York Times/Siena poll identifies as the most important to voters.

“The most important aspect of it for me is making it a lot easier for people to access candidates’ records,” Delavan-Hoover added. “I know that sounds like an obvious thing, but it’s hard to get into the actual records of the actions of your candidates, especially down the ballot, like state legislators.”

Delavan-Hoover said that most of the people on the BallotWise team are either college friends of his or those of his co-founders, and that those friends pulled people from their networks to join the team.

“We assembled a team from our networks pretty quickly and sketched up the initial mock up, worked on it over the summer, and then had better-made developments this fall,” Delavan-Hoover said.

Abdulrezak stressed the importance of holding elected officials accountable for the positions and actions they have taken.

“It’s very hard in a world where we’re inundated with data to actually hold the people — who are making decisions about so many important things — accountable,” he said.

“We’re exploring how we can advance the platform to better suit people’s needs as we go into the future,” Abdulrezak said.