744 Kelly Riordan:

Let’s face it, a lot of people are freaked out right now, not knowing what or whom to believe, not even sure if their votes will count in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, with democracy under threat in this bitterly divided country. My guest today Kelly Riordan decided to take matters into her own hands and create a fact-based website that allows anyone to find and understand exactly what their lawmaker supports. We talk about what motivated her to create WeWillDecide.com and how we can all be informed and empowered citizens.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and download Podopolo. Follow Wings of Inspired Business there and join the Wings community so we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we change it up a bit to meet a cardiac sonographer turned political entrepreneur. Kelly Riordan is on a mission to take the fear and hysteria out of our politics, empowering people with her web platform We Will Decide.com which empowers people to get the specific facts of how their lawmakers in the U.S. Congress vote and what they actually support as opposed to what they say.

What a mess. Democracy itself is under threat in the United States, with a sizeable number of Trump Maga Republicans openly campaigning on platforms that would not recognize the results of the vote, presumably only if it went in a direction they didn’t like. There is a lot of disinformation and conspiracy theories out there – including what’s known as the “big lie” from the 2020 elections that lead to the January 6^th violent insurrection – and since efforts by many Republican state legislatures to suppress the vote and worse.

Kelly Riordan got so fed up she decided to take matters into her own hands. She says she used to be a typical apathetic voter, but with democracy itself under threat, she says being uninformed is no longer an option. She says picking up bits and pieces of news is useless. How do you know what is real and what isn’t? Voting history, on the other hand, is real and cannot be manipulated. Years ago, when Kelly decided to research candidates, she got frustrated with Google and decided to build a website that would allow her to find the information she wanted. A cardiac sonographer, Kelly financed her site – called WeWillDecide.com by credit cards and basic scrimping and saving. Six years later Wewilldecide.com is teeming with more information than you may ever use, but you can search for whatever you care about, in effect voting on the same bills that your congressmen and women do. The site then compares the two to give you your personalized approval rating. There’s more to it of course, and Kelly says her most fervent wish is to give the users the gift of smugly ignoring every bit of annoying political advertising and empowering them to do their own due diligence, based on actual numbers, to find out exactly how much you agree with the incumbent.

Today Kelly shares how her platform works, why it is important, and her plans for expanding it in the future to include state and local government.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Kelly Riordan, and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock:

Kelly, welcome to Wings.

Kelly Riordan:

Thank you so much for having me on your program. I’m so flattered that you asked little old me to come on and talk about what I’m doing.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, it is so important. I happen to believe strongly in our democracy, and that our democracy here in the United States and elsewhere in the world is threatened, and somehow we need to figure out how to be good civic citizens. How did you, as a cardiac sonographer, suddenly decide to leap into this space and make us better citizens?

Kelly Riordan:

Well, it’s kind of funny because yeah, I really have no fascination with politics at all. I don’t listen to political shows. I find them all completely annoying, but I just wanted to make good decisions myself. The idea really came to me when many elections ago I was trying to… I hadn’t been a consistent voter and I was kind of like, “Ugh, I suck.” I need to be voting consistently. I have this right. So many people have done so much so that I can have this right. I need to use it all the time. I was like, well, if I’m voting, I’m going to make a good informed choice.

I’m a total geek, so I went online to try to do my research about how the incumbent voted on this, that and the other. I just wanted that kind of information. And as much as I tried to find it, I could only find just scrap fit bits and pieces. I couldn’t really put together any kind of a whole cohesive picture on whether I actually liked who was in office or not. It was staggering how hard it was to try to find any kind of real information, and so I thought this just needs to be organized better.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, it does. When we think of it, we’re barraged all the time, just in our society, whether it’s politics or anything else, there’s this information overload. There’s all kinds of dark money in our politics, so we don’t really know who’s paying for what we don’t really know what a deep fake is anymore, whether the information is real. We don’t really know anything, and it’s very difficult to have a democracy function when we can’t even agree on what a fact is.

Kelly Riordan:

Things are sure different these days.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s getting to be a big problem.

Kelly Riordan:

It’s a big problem. It’s a big problem because who do you trust? Who do you trust? This site that I’ve built, it is just straight strict information. The information is gleaned directly from government websites, and it’s really the only thing that’s unchangeable, which is voting and voting history for the senators and the representatives. That’s set in stone.

Melinda Wittstock:

You can get a really picture of the incumbent in terms of what that they actually vote on. What about campaign promises for new people coming in or their backgrounds? Is there a way to really compare and contrast? Are you getting data from the new crop as well?

Kelly Riordan:

That is in the works. I’m not able to do that at this moment because I don’t have enough of a user base to really bring in… This is really just getting out there really in the last year. Yes, people are using it. It’s such a different way of thinking about getting your political information, because it’s just you, and your opinion, and voting history, and you’re voting along all the same things that your senators and your representatives do, and then you get a calculated percentage of agreement between yourself and everybody else.

You can just click on senators, reps, anybody you want and just go, “Oh, wow. I agree with this guy, 22%. I agree with this person.” You’ve got actual hard numbers. As far as future people that are challenging the incumbents, yes there is a program in place for that. When somebody says, “Hey, I’m running for district, blah, blah, blah.” I’d be like, “Great. Let’s have you vote along too with all the same things that we’re all voting along, so you can be put in…” Because that’s really all about equations. It’s numbers. That’s what I wanted. I wanted hard empiric data. I wanted hard numbers. Don’t want anybody’s opinions. I don’t want anybody to talk to me. I think everyone’s so tired. We’re just all so very, very tired of all of it.

Melinda Wittstock:

We’re recording this a month or so away from the midterm elections here in the United States where there’s a lot at stake, and no matter what perspective they have, feel that there’s a lot at stake. You have polling that’s suggesting that a lot of people think the country’s headed for a civil war. You’ve got all this stuff going on, and then you have a bunch of new candidates running that don’t believe in the election results from 2020.

Kelly Riordan:

I know.

Melinda Wittstock:

Or are running on platforms saying that they will just not take into consideration voting in who should be the next President. That’s actually their platform. Do you capture

their campaign promises?

Kelly Riordan:

No, I don’t care about campaign promises whatsoever. What I do care is when they are in office is what they actually said they were going to do versus what they actually do. A voter, one-on-one, can actually see how much they really do agree with their incumbent. As far as people coming into office, that’s a tough one because that is tough to control. But I find that one of the neat side effects of using the site that I have is as people just spend a few minutes on it here and there, you get a little bit more information here and there. It is, how do you eat an elephant or jackass? A bite at a time. It’s just a bite at a time. It’s actually quite calming because you are more in the know, and it just doesn’t all seem like one loud, horrible noise in all the garbage that you have to wade through to just make a simple decision, or a complex decision.

Melinda Wittstock:

I guess practically, if you’re in a state where there’s a particularly contentious election, and you go into your website, and you can figure out the incumbent, who are they really? Then when you’re getting all the campaign advertising from the challenger, and they’re saying all kinds of things about the challenger, whatever, and you can look for yourself and say, “Well no, actually that’s not what that person did. Oh no, actually that is what that person did.” Is that a use case?

Kelly Riordan:

Absolutely. Oh, that’s definitely very useful. One of the things I really like a lot about the site and I think is very telling, besides the fact that you can vote alongside and you can get calculated percentages, is you can see all the bills that have been proposed by senators and by representatives. Now the vast majority of them, 90% never make it to the floor, but you can see what people have proposed. A lot of that stuff… Well, the vast majority of it never sees the light of day, but it’s written down and those records are kept. I really don’t think there’s a better way to really see the color of a candidate than really look at some of the stuff that they propose and go, “Oh, that was their outside voice, and they put that in writing. Okay. Wow. Okay.” There’s so many venues to do research on the site, and it’s really kind of limitless. It depends on if you want to spend a few minutes, you can spend a few minutes. If you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole, have fun. We’ll throw you a line. Yeah, there’s a lot of that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Does this work for all levels of government? I mean, you’ve got Senate, House, you got the national things, you got the state stuff. You’ve got governors. You’ve got people running for sheriff. How deep does it go?

Kelly Riordan:

Yeah, not yet. I wanted to start with the big problem.

Kelly Riordan:

This is Congress. This is the House in the Senate, but there is also if you want to see executive orders, those are all in there too. Judges that are proposed, those are in there too. There’s a lot of information there. And one thing that I built on [inaudible 00:10:02]… Not me, my web designer, who’s a genius. I couldn’t do it, but I wanted a web search, and I just couldn’t believe there was no such thing as you couldn’t go to the government websites and search keywords and do searches, and on mine, you can. If you can just go to a window and type in gun control, you can go to a window type in abortion. Then you can also use all the tags that the government uses, where bills are located, like the environment and all sorts of national security. There’s just 80 different tags that you can go through, whatever’s important personally, to a voter. When you get more in control of the information you’re getting, the really nifty side effect is the hysteria goes away. That is really what all of… It’s all fear based. All of this is all fear based.

Melinda Wittstock:

It is.

Kelly Riordan:

It’s all fear mongering.

Melinda Wittstock:

I think people can be more easily controlled when they’re in fear, and I think it’s a specific tactic.

Kelly Riordan:

Oh, it absolutely is. I mean, if you just watch commercials on TV, it’s meant to do one of two things. It’s made to make you feel inferior in some way, thank you to TV industry, that you’re not up to stuff in one way or another, make you feel inferior, or it’s there to make you afraid, afraid of any number of things. I just don’t believe that the general public is even aware of it because it’s so prevalent. It’s just how our society works. It’s all based on fear in hysteria, and if you keep everybody hysterical and entertained, loaves and circuses, then everybody’s a lot easier to control if they’re just freaked out all the time.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. It’s so, so true. At a time when we live in such… I like to call it infobesity, where there’s a lot of empty information calories, but we’re not getting information nutrition. Hat’s off to you for tackling this. It’s a very big project, and you’re making me nostalgic in full disclosure Kelly, because I created something that was of similar to this way, way back, like 2010, 2011. It was a mobile app, NewsiT, and it was relying on crowdsourced information.

Kelly Riordan:

Oh, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

I have a long background as an award-winning journalist, so I created a series of algorithms to be able to analyze using natural language processing and the beginnings of AI, really, to actually understand and be able to score for not only relevance, but also for reliability, like what was the probability that this particular tidbit of information within a story was accurate? It was a major [inaudible 00:13:27]. We had 500,000 people using this thing and creating it, and we were able really to be the antidote to fake news, but it was way ahead of the time because no one even knew what fake news was. Nobody even understood how social media was going to kind of rewire our brains to be in permanent outrage. Nobody knew any of that yet. It was creating a solution for something that people didn’t even realize there was a problem coming. It’s really important work, and I have the deepest respect for what you’re doing because it’s hard. Take me through your process of how you’ve built this, and how long it’s taken, and what the challenges have been

Kelly Riordan:

I’m about as computer savvy as the average person. I work with systems at work and da, da, da, da. I’m an excellent shopper. I’m great at finding information I want, things like that, but as far as building programs and algorithms and things like that, yeah, no, no, no. The first challenge was finding the person that could do it for me. I went to some really big firms and when I started talking to them about what I wanted, they’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa there, lady. You’re talking about a Facebook level size of memory.” I’m all like, “Yeah, so.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, a lot of data.

Kelly Riordan:

Oh, my God. Geez. The universe puts things in your path that you’re supposed to get. So long story short, I found a great guy, a one man show that that was really into what I was doing as well, and was so patient with me because I don’t know a lot of the computer terms. I could tell him exactly what I wanted and exactly what I wanted to do. I tell him my whole thing. He’s like, “Oh, okay.” I’m like, “Okay?” “Yeah, okay.” Then it was just a lot of… Then there’s been a lot of growing pains and moving things around because I really wanted it to be very user friendly.

The young people who can process just vast amounts of information so quickly, those people are amazing. I am less one of those people. I wanted like if my mom wanted to use it. I’d love for poli-sci classes and colleges to get ahold of this, and really start digging and using the tool. It’s a free tool, because for a while there, I was trying to figure out how do I charge for this? It just didn’t fit with the… If some 16 year old in a poli-sci high school class wants to use it, I don’t want them to have to go to their parents and ask for a credit card. I don’t. If somebody’s really broke, especially now, sometimes a few bucks a month is a big deal, and I get that. So I did make it free, and people are encouraged, of course, if they want to toss me a couple bucks a month, I can hire more people, or I can hire anybody.

Melinda Wittstock:

Is it going to continue like that? I mean, because really what you’re doing as a public service. I think where models like this do start to get into trouble is the minute that money is involved, unless you can figure out a great way to do it, money starts to influence the content. This is the problem with social media. I mean, this is how that evolved. It started out as being this amazing noble thing, connecting people and having these amazing conversations. Then all of a sudden the algorithms are changed and why are we outraged? Because that drives more engagement, and therefore more ad revenue. How do you see this being something that could support you? Is it nonprofit? How is it organized?

Kelly Riordan:

I hemmed hawed, seriously for years, about how to do this. You can put advertising on it. I’m not doing that because that just… Whether it’s a Tesla or it’s a Ford truck, it has a lean one way or another, right?

Kelly Riordan:

This was the thing that weighed the heaviest on my mind for the creation of this site because the whole point of this site is for people to be able to trust the information that they get. They can’t do that if there’s advertising on there. Advertising has a lean. It has a lean, no matter what it is. Whether it’s a Ford truck or a Tesla, it has a lean. How could I take money from advertisers and then say I’m completely unbiased? I don’t think you can. I don’t think that exists.

Then I thought I’m just going to charge a really nominal flat fee, like a few dollars a month for it, and see how that goes. Even though that seemed okay, it just rubbed me all the wrong way. I feel okay asking for donations, and any donation I get… Literally, as of this moment, not $1 has made it into my own pocket. Well, there’s just not a lot, anyway, but I just want to get a Venti someday at Starbucks. Anyway, I just couldn’t put a monetary charge on it. I just couldn’t do it. That’s why if you would like to make a donation, a monthly donation, a one-time donation, whatever, to help support this, then absolutely it’s there. But if people don’t want to, they don’t have to. If this is just a really great thing that just can help people out and make people feel calmer, and give people the information they want and need and make it easier to find things. Then that’s okay. That’s great.

I do want to get more donations because I have people in the wings that I’m waiting that I would like to hire to take this to even some more levels to help people make more… I really do believe you make political decisions daily when you spend your money. I hate that it’s like that now, but it’s like that now. I just want to make it bigger, and make the scope bigger, and give people whatever information they want to use or they can choose not to use. But yeah, I can’t put anything monetary on it. It just doesn’t work with it. It just doesn’t.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I remember in the NewsiT context, really played around with that because that was an advertising model, but then we put a lot of thought into applying the same algorithms we were to content to the advertising, and it definitely does limit your earnings in that case.

It’s interesting because there’s all these different models now, and business models for social impact or social enterprise that’s kind of like the B Corp model where you can make money for something, but you can do so responsible in a way that it is good for society, but there’s a lot of different ways. I do believe that people should be able to… You should be rewarded for what you’re doing. You should figure out a way to make money from it, but how do you do that? It’s a really big challenge.

Kelly Riordan:

There’s all kinds of organizations that do great work, and they run on donations.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah.

Kelly Riordan:

It really came down to being comfortable. I can’t say, “Hey, trust me and give me money.” I can’t. Those two things, they just don’t go together. They don’t.

Melinda Wittstock:

Donations and tip jars and all those things are great. Where do you see it going, Kelly? Ultimately at full vision, what will this platform be able to do?

Kelly Riordan:

At full vision, I would like to get it to where it does go down to a smaller levels, to state levels, but that’s a huge amount of manpower, which I currently don’t have. But what I would really like to happen is I’d really like people to truly understand that one vote, and we saw in the last election where a couple of states were swung by less than a 1% margin. The individual votes absolutely do count. People that say they’re apolitical. They’re not really apolitical. They’re just exhausted.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. Well, that’s true. Yeah, and increasingly.

Kelly Riordan:

I just want to give people a safe and quiet place where they’re not being bombarded and jerked around, just to get their information and get them back into the voting pool and get them… They can care again. It’s okay for you to care again. People that care shouldn’t be yelling and screaming. I want everybody to get back on board and use and use their votes, use this privilege that we have, and know that they can ignore all the crap. It’s okay. They don’t have to go that way. There’s a different way to do it.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so interesting. I mean the other perspective I bring to this, because I’m a serial entrepreneur on business five in podcasting, but with the Podopolo podcast app and business, number one, as an adult for me was Capital News Connection, and we reported from the House, and Senate, and the White House, localizing Congress for 300 public radio stations, and a growing number of commercial television stations, newspapers, digital properties, and whatnot. We had such a different approach because we would actually read the bills.

We did a series one time where we interviewed all members of Congress and we asked them if they were actually reading the bills that they were voting on. 100% of them admitted that they were not even reading the bills. The other thing that we established was that a lot of these things were being voted on in committee in the middle of the night. There would be five lobbyists for every Congress person and Senator, and the lobbyists would be writing the bills. Things would get into these things that they weren’t even aware of. It seemed like such a broken system on that lobbying side, because if you don’t have an army of lobbyists, how can you be heard?

Kelly Riordan:

Right. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

But it was extraordinary because all these bills pass, and you don’t actually know what’s in the bill. If you wanted to know what’s in the Inflation Reduction Act for instance, as opposed to what people say is in it could be wildly different from what’s actually in it. So you could go into your website and actually look at that?

Kelly Riordan:

Yeah. You click on the bill and it takes you not to my site. It takes you directly to the government site where the bills are shown.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, so you can see who voted on it, and what’s actually in the bill. I mean, this is so important because we don’t know. Different people say different things about the same bill that are diametrically opposed, and who can you believe? The only way you can know what’s in it is to take the time to read it yourself. How do you get people actually rolling up their sleeves and interested in actually knowing what they’re voting on if the lawmakers don’t even know what they’re voting on?

Kelly Riordan:

Well, I think what it really comes down to is first, just letting people know there is a different way to go about this. So far, there hasn’t been a different way to go about this, as long as I’ve been here. You just do your best with voting. To really be informed is… Everything is just with so much opinion. When you just want the straight skinny, I just wanted to give people a place to where they could go just to get the straight information.

First of all, it’s about kind of flipping the script a little bit, and allowing people to know there is a completely different way that won’t make you out of your mind to do this. It’s really about just letting people get their toes back in the pool and feeling… Again, it’s about being in a space where you can do your own research quietly, calmly, see things that matter to you.

What’s also really neat about the site, if you don’t mind me tooting my own horn just a little bit, is… I’m a dork, so I like graphs. When you see a lot of the voting on the… Because not all votes are counted. Unanimous votes aren’t counted and voice votes aren’t counted, but pretty much all the important stuff are counted, and you can see the giant red and blue stripes of opposition. But what’s really interesting is I’ve noticed that a lot of times, especially in the House, you’ll see the red and blue stripes, mostly getting together on quite a lot of things, more than you would think

Melinda Wittstock:

More than you would know. That’s encouraging.

Kelly Riordan:

You wouldn’t know that otherwise, and I’m like, “Hey, that made me feel a little bit better.” A lot of times its business stuff, and a lot of times it’s Ukrainian stuff, but at least there’s some agreement. What’s interesting is because of my graph, I look down below and there’s always these same 14 to 16 House representatives that no matter how great the idea is, they always vote against it no matter what. I’m like, “Oh really?” I can bookmark those people so I can keep an eye on them. I mean, when I say vote against everything, one of the bills specifically, it was a bill… As our armed forces members are being discharged into civilian life, they are automatically enrolled into Veterans Affairs. They’re automatically enrolled into the VA. They don’t have to do anything. You served your country, and now you’re enrolled in the VA. Okay, cool. These same core guys, they all voted against it. It’s “Boys, really? Come on. How can that…” I wouldn’t be able to see that otherwise, so I do find a lot of the patterns that I’ve seen emerging really interesting because there was no way I would’ve been able to see that before. I just think it’s become… Now it’s not scary anymore to me, and now it’s interesting.

Melinda Wittstock:

It occurs to me as a recovering journalist myself, that this could be a really good database for journalists, also. They could really use this. It would help their work as well. Kelly, I want to make sure that everybody knows how to find the site. It’s called, wewilldecide.com and how to sign up, and also follow you on whatever social media platforms you’re on, or anything like that. What’s the best way?

Kelly Riordan:

Well, wewilldecide.com. You just log in there. There’s a little section, us in the news, and what’s going on, and all that stuff. As far as the personal social media, I do have a know your representatives on Facebook and a couple small things, but to tell you the God’s honest truth, I’m still a health employee. I’m still working. I’m older, so I don’t take a thousand selfies, ever. I can’t take a good selfie to save my life. I don’t understand. I’m not doing the duck lips. I’m too old. Yeah, but just going on the site, wewilldecide.com, and that’ll kind of also keep you linked in on what’s up and coming, as far as podcasts and articles that have been written, things of that nature. The other one thing that I think is super, super, super valuable on the website is you can check your voter registration every single freaking day, if you want to.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, that’s actually really important. I’m glad you raised that because voting laws are changing in all the states and you may think you’re registered and you may show up to vote, and find you’re not. This is a really good time to be checking into all of that, no matter where you live.

Kelly Riordan:

You need to check into that way ahead of time. Where’s your polling… Are you still… I mean, even in this last election, I had friends that were just tossed off the roles. I’m like, if they would’ve found out in time to go-

Melinda Wittstock:

There’s an active strategy for voter suppression currently, so very, very important to check that and get that done. Kelly, thank you so much for all that you’re doing to improve our democracy and our world. Thank you for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Kelly Riordan:

Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for chatting with me. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Thank you so very, very much.