A summer spent in front of Excel spreadsheets led two Yale seniors to develop software they say could make campaign finance trouble-free — but only for Democrats.
Last month, Steven Winter and Yale College Democrats president Ben Stango helped to found QuickCampaigns, a company that will produce a Web application to simplify political campaign finances by transferring budget data between two budget software systems to avoid budget errors and state fines. The program will not be released until early 2011, and the company co-founders said they will sell their products only to Democrats.
Seth Bannon, a Harvard senior, another co-founder and CEO of QuickCampaigns, said Democrats are not using technology as effectively as Republicans and need the software for themselves.
Trevor Wagener, president of the Yale College Republicans, said in an e-mail that “the software sounds like a simple mechanism.”
“The time saved by this software is likely to be marginal, but in a close race, such details can influence the outcome,” Wagener added. “If they actually have a valuable product, it makes no sense for them to reject half of their potential consumers … They are letting partisan zealotry impinge on common sense.”
In response, Bannon said products sold to political campaigns are made by groups that are “extremely partisan” and “no political vendors exist that sell a product such as [QuickCampaigns] successfully to both parties.”
Read the full story at the Yale Daily News.
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