Ranked choice voting—currently used in more than 50 cities across the U.S. and in the states of Maine and Alaska—is an electoral reform that lets people rank several choices in the order they prefer them, with the goal of finding the options that are most palatable to all. The idea is to offer an alternative to going with the choice of the single largest faction. Ranked choice voting appeared on the ballot in ten jurisdictions in 2022, and won in eight, including Nevada.
One factor that’s prevented this method from being used more widely is technology. Voting booths weren’t set up for it.
Now, a fledgling startup called RankedVote is offering software-as-a-service technology to simplify the process of making decisions with ranked voting online. The program was used by New York City when the municipality used ranked choice voting for the first time, after an official discovered the company’s website, and it has been used by the Alaska Division of Elections to educate its voters.
Tad Milbourn aims to simplify ranked choice voting.
Founder Tad Milbourn, based in Middleton, WI, likens the software to Survey Monkey, if it only did ranked choice voting. He founded the startup as a side hustle while working at Intuit. During the lockdowns of the pandemic, he trained himself to code and created the software. The one-person business, incorporated in 2020, now brings in about $28,000 a year currently. It has served 22,906 users and 424,189 voters.
Millbourn believes that revenue number could go far higher if ranked-choice voting catches on. “For it to be used in the mainstream, it needs to be used in everyday contexts,” he explains.
He is keeping an eye on what happens now that the November elections have taken place. “It will be interesting to see how much this business is correlated to interest in elections generally,” he says.
It’s not just elections where Ranked Choice voting can be used, he adds. It’s been used by businesses trying to take the pulse of employees, and for use in selecting the nonprofits that a company’s charitable arm supports. One video game studio, Studio Wildcard, used it to reach out to its community to decide which character to include in a future version of the game, he says.
“It’s got very broad applicability,” he says. “Any time you have a group where everyone’s voice is more or less equal, that’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-pay platform, and served as CEO for four years, before it was acquired by the payment processor Stripe. He is also a veteran of Intuit, where he led innovation teams charged with revamping the culture.
“I had a front-row seat to entrepreneurship in the U.S. through Intuit,” he says. “I’ve always been intrigued by entrepreneurship as a way of self-expression. After my startup was acquired, I asked myself, ‘Can I have my cake and eat it, too? Can I engineer a setup where my work is fulfilling, learn new things and have the type of lifestyle I want with my wife and family? Can it also promote and advance the causes I care about?’ I am not there yet, but I would say the early results are super-encouraging.”