But the 26-year-old grad student has invested his money and much of his time over the past year creating a way to better engage his Millennial generation in the political process. Henne is the co-founder and CEO of Ulection.com, a social media-inspired website where candidates, politicians and voters can freely interact and share information.
Henne said many young adults like himself feel disconnected from politics, so an accessible, more direct line of communication with candidates may better motivate them to show up on election day.
“I don’t vote except during presidential elections and my friends don’t want to vote,” he said. “They think the candidates are all the same and they don’t think their votes really matter. I wanted to help them make their voice heard and to show them they can make a difference.”
Henne, who’s home visiting family in Carmel Valley this summer, graduated from Torrey Pines High School and earned a biology degree from San Francisco State University. He now works in San Francisco as an emergency medical technician, where he interacts daily with patients who are challenged by poverty, addiction, homelessness and a lack of health care.
Henne said this exposure shaped his political views, but he became frustrated trying to find the voting records, biographies and issue positions of candidates and incumbents in his district. He was also turned off the bias and rhetoric in political mailers, radio and TV ads. So rather than make a misinformed choice, he didn’t vote.
Then Bernie Sanders came along last summer, and Henne said he was inspired by the Vermont senator’s message of using grassroots campaigning to overcome big-money campaigns funded by super PACs.
With the help of his friend Daniel Alvidrez, a freelance website designer, they spent 10 months developing their website, which debuted in May. Similar to Facebook, Ulection.com allows users to create free home pages where they can post their profile, positions, speeches, news articles and videos.
Users can sign up as either candidates, officials or citizens (voters) and interact by tagging items by location, political party or issue. As the site builds its membership and new tools are added, members will also be able to organize political events.
Voters can communicate with candidates and officials by following and liking (or disliking) their posts and positions. Eventually a statistic-gathering tool will be added that will measure these reader responses to create a candidate “approval rating.” The candidates will also one day be able to analyze how their speeches, videos and positions are registering with citizens broken down by age, gender, party and issue.
Although signing up for Ulection is free, Henne said he and Alvidrez are running the site as a business. They plan to sell advertising space and eventually find a way to use the data for analytical purposes.
Since its launch two months ago, Ulection has signed up 388 citizens, 55 candidates and 10 political officials. Henne has also created sample profile pages for several major candidates for fall office, including Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Among the first candidates to register was former state Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for San Diego mayor in the spring. Although she was heavily outspent by incumbent and victor Kevin Faulconer, she came in second with 22 percent of the vote. Ulection offered her an inexpensive way to share information, she said.
“It’s useful in combination with direct retail politics,” Saldaña said. “Nothing ever beats the handshake and direct personal contact with voters, but this could be an essential way to share information.”
The longtime college professor said she was drawn to Ulection for its creative approach. Twenty years ago she got her start in public service by designing websites for politicians. Now she teaches information technology.
“Twenty years ago, the opportunity for interactivity on a website was very limited. Given the growth of social media and new capabilities online, I was intrigued and wanted to experiment with it myself,” she said.
Another early joiner was Jill Stein, who is making her second presidential bid as a Green Party candidate. In a statement about joining Ulection, Stein wrote that she sees the site as an “alternative to biased corporate media.”
“We’re now on Ulection, which gives all candidates an equal platform to spread their message, regardless of party affiliation,” she said. “Look out media gatekeepers, the free, open Internet is changing politics for good.”
Many of the citizens who signed up in Ulection’s initial months were friends Henne invited on Facebook. As a result, the pool of voters on the site are mostly Millennials. For now, Ulection has only a web page because Henne doesn’t have the money and Alvidrez doesn’t have the training to build a smartphone application. Once the app is built, they expect membership to grow exponentially, both in size and diversity.
Because the website launched so late in this election cycle, Henne doesn’t expect it to have much of an impact on the fall vote. Instead, he hopes Ulection will gain traction over the next 18 months and be an important information source for the 2018 election.
Next month, Henne heads back to San Francisco State where he’ll start a two-year master’s degree in public health. His goal is to work for the government in the public health sector where he can influence public policy.
He also plans to become a very active voter in the future. His favorite candidate, Sanders, didn’t win the nomination but he said he’s energized to keep Sanders’ revolution alive by encouraging citizen engagement through Ulection.
“I want to bring people out to join and talk and understand that if you make your voice heard, the politicians will hear you,” he said.
©2016 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
