She built a voter guide for an audience of one - herself, baffled at the bottom of a 2014 ballot. Then the rest of the country found it.
Alex Niemczewski · CEO, BallotReady
Most ballots are decided at the top and guessed at all the way down.
Alex Niemczewski spends her days fixing the bottom.
Alex Niemczewski runs BallotReady, the nonpartisan voter guide that does the thing almost nobody bothers to do: it tells you, race by race, who is actually on your ballot. Not just the president or the governor, but the water reclamation commissioner, the appellate judges, the school board, the mosquito abatement district, the referendum buried in legalese near the bottom. As co-founder and CEO she has scaled the company from a handful of jurisdictions to coverage of every race and referendum in all 50 states, and turned a personal annoyance into civic infrastructure used by voters, campaigns, and advocacy groups alike.
The premise is almost stubbornly simple. An informed voter is the smallest, most powerful unit of democracy, and the information needed to be one is scattered across candidate websites, press clippings, social media, and the endorsements of people you trust. BallotReady gathers all of it, links each fact back to its original source, and hands you a ballot you can actually fill out with intent. "From the beginning," Niemczewski says, "we put voters first." It is the kind of sentence companies put on a wall and forget. She built a product around it.
Her team also builds tools beyond the guide itself - registration flows, vote-by-mail helpers, and outreach products that let advocacy groups and campaigns inform and mobilize the people they reach. The throughline is the same one she started with: take the part of voting that makes people shrug and leave it blank, and make it legible.
I wanted to prepare myself for the 2014 midterms, so I made a website just for myself.
She showed up to vote and hit a wall of names she didn't recognize. Judges. Commissioners. Offices with titles longer than their job descriptions. So she did what a coder with a philosophy degree does: she built herself a research website. Audience of one.
When she asked other people how they handled the same races, the answer kept coming back the same way: they guessed, or they skipped them. She wasn't the odd one out. She was the rule. That was the market.
In 2015, with co-founder Aviva Rosman, she ran BallotReady's first live test during Chicago's mayoral runoff. The whole experiment cost roughly $180 - about the price of a nice dinner for two. It worked.
A philosophy major who taught Ruby on Rails before she taught a country how to vote.
What separates BallotReady from a thousand earnest civic projects is a refusal to choose between data and people. Niemczewski tracks every metric on the site and, in the same breath, insists on talking to voters in person all the time. The dashboard tells her what users do. The conversation tells her why. Most founders pick one religion. She kept both.
Before any of this she worked at a nonprofit helping low-income people secure union jobs - work that taught her there was, in her words, "this whole avenue of making society better that I was not tapped into." Voting was that avenue. Not the headline kind that fills cable news, but the quiet, local kind that actually decides whether your block gets repaved and who sits on the bench when you need them to.
Her advice to anyone with an idea is almost suspiciously low-tech: find a friend, start talking about your idea with them. It's how BallotReady began - a college friendship turned co-founding partnership with Aviva Rosman, later joined by a small team building toward a stubbornly large goal. The company's name is also its entire thesis. It does one thing, and it tells you what that thing is. It makes you ballot ready, all the way down to the mosquito abatement board.
The honors followed the work rather than the other way around. Crain's Chicago Business named her to its "20 in their 20s" list. Techweek tapped her for its Techweek 100. She was named a Bluhm/Helfand Social Innovation Fellow. Funders from MergeLane and M25 to the National Science Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the University of Chicago put money behind a product whose entire job is to make a confusing ballot less confusing - which, in an era loud with opinions and short on local facts, turns out to be a surprisingly radical act.
She has a philosophy degree but taught people to code Ruby on Rails before she taught a country how to vote.
BallotReady launched for the price of a nice dinner for two - about $180.
The company is named for exactly what it does: it makes you ballot ready, down to the mosquito abatement board.
She still insists on talking to voters in person, even while tracking every metric on the site.