By: Cindy Gonzalez, Nebraska Examiner – February 4, 2025
re-posted with permission from https://nebraskaexaminer.com
Lincoln, Nebraska — Heather Nelson fell asleep anxious, troubled by a mother’s emotions broadcast on the evening news — but more so that she’d missed a deadline to support a related bill before Nebraska lawmakers.
An idea would later jolt the Omaha college professor awake. Her 2022 dream led to a $75,000 state grant that helped launch Ideologix Insights, a startup tech company with an online platform offering pulse polls and other ways intended to enhance how folks can connect with elected officials, candidates, and community leaders.
Last week, Nelson’s data analytics team made a public debut of sorts, releasing results of a snapshot poll they had conducted on controversial proposals to shift Nebraska’s system of awarding Electoral College votes in presidential elections to winner-take-all.
The company’s findings, presented during a packed legislative hearing at the Capitol, offered a taste of how Nelson envisions her venture improving civic and political engagement. She said the startup’s polling approach allows for a quick collection, analysis and regurgitation of Nebraskans’ insights on specific topics.
“Think of it as a temperature check,” Nelson said. “It opens a dialogue and truly brings in that ‘second house’ of the people.”
The ‘second house’ reference relates to the role Nebraska residents play in a state that’s unique for having the nation’s only single-house Legislature.
Like a Netflix menu
Here’s how the company’s approach works: Nebraskans 15 years of age and older can register at no cost on the company’s PollTheVote.com site.
Elected officials, candidates, and civic groups essentially buy subscription space on the home page, which Nelson describes as resembling a Netflix menu.
Participants click an icon to find an elected official or civic group and related newsletters or pertinent information. For pulse polls, proprietary software allows the lab team, led by Nelson’s colleague and data analyst John Collard, to collect responses from verified users and create insight reports on a particular issue. The company also expects to cover national issues, such as how Nebraskans feel about President Trump’s executive orders.
Nelson said the startup’s polling is not “scientific” in reaching out to a representative sample of the electorate and then weighting results. She said the strength of popular polling, as conducted by her company, is that results reflect the answers of people who choose to participate. “We are reporting the raw data as it comes in, like on Election Day,” she said. “It’s zero errors.”
About 230 responses came in over four days for the winner-take-all poll. Participants answered a basic yes-or-no question, a format designed to keep the process uncomplicated and quick, as Nelson had dreamed it in 2022.
Results reflected overwhelming support (91.83%) for keeping Nebraska’s unconventional system of awarding one electoral vote apiece to the winner in each congressional district and two to the statewide winner instead of returning to the state’s decades-old system of awarding all electoral votes to the statewide winner of the presidential popular vote.
Ideologix Insights can aggregate demographic information without identifying individuals and also can offer details that shed more light on opinions by congressional and legislative district, age, party affiliation and more.
In the case of the winner-take-all poll, 62% of those who chose to participate were registered Democrats, 22.6% were nonpartisans and 12% were Republicans.
Dig deeper into demographics
In designing the company, Nelson said she sought help from various sources, including Nebraska’s Platte Institute. Laura Ebke, a former state senator and senior fellow at Platte, said the entrepreneurial effort has “great potential” for providing near real-time feedback on public policy issues. It can dig deeper to provide more demographic data on respondents than the Nebraska Legislature’s online system for collecting public input on bills. Ebke said a challenge comes in asking Nebraskans to provide personal information to become a verified user. “Whether or not enough people will trust the system to get engaged is yet to be determined,” she said. “It may take a couple of sessions to really catch fire.”
So far, a few elected officials and political candidates have bought into the system. Nelson said about 1,000 Nebraskans have registered for an account and to receive alerts of possible poll opportunities.
State Sen. Margo Juarez of South Omaha is an early sign-on among elected officials, noting that some people are reluctant to use social media sites such as Facebook. She considers Nelson’s platform another option for reaching constituents. “I think this is another tool that maybe people will feel comfortable using,” said Juarez. “For me, being a new senator, I really value feedback from voters and I don’t want to miss an opportunity that might help attract some users in the community.”
The Ideologix team plans to seek another grant from the Department of Economic Development to enhance software features.
Missed opportunity
The inspiration for the venture harkens back to Nelson eating dinner when a news station aired a story about the mother whose child was in a wheelchair. Nelson couldn’t recall for certain the legislation at hand. But as she sought additional detail at the time, she realized she had missed the opportunity to testify publicly.
Her attention then shifted: There should be an easier way, she thought, to deliver a sentiment to an elected official “in a private protected way.”
It opens a dialogue and truly brings in that ‘second house’ of the people.
While Nelson, a former banker, has taught business and entrepreneurial courses in Omaha for two decades, she was not trained in technology. She took the vision that awoke her in 2022 — of a cell phone pinging with a request to answer a simple yes or no about a hot topic — and collaborated with Collard. The pair secured the state grant funded by the Nebraska Business Innovation Act. Their business plan projects hiring up to 400 local professionals if the venture takes off nationally.
Nelson anticipates becoming a familiar face at future legislative hearings, offering poll results she believes can drive decision-making. “I think it offers Nebraskans a new way to be on the front end of legislation creation,” she said.
Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence.
Contact Editor Aaron Sanderford for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com
About Cindy Gonzalez
Senior Reporter Cindy Gonzalez, an Omaha native, has more than 35 years of experience, largely at the Omaha World-Herald. Her coverage areas have included business and real estate development; regional reporting; immigration, demographics and diverse communities; and City Hall and local politics.
Re-posted with permission
