Follow My Vote is dedicated to improving the elections. We currently do this through innovative technologies such as blockchain technology to ultimately increase voter turnout and transparency. When we saw the Snapchat election story on the day of the UK elections, we were ecstatic. This was a blend of new technology and excitement surrounding voter participation.

If you don’t know what Snapchat is don’t worry. It is a fairly new smartphone app that lets users send messages and images to one another. The unique part is that the message gets deleted after being viewed.

One feature that has been added to Snapchat is called “stories”. You can choose to send a message to one friend or you can opt to make the message your story. This means all of your friends will be able to view this message for the next 24 hours.

Recently, Snapchat has been producing stories of their own called “Our Stories”.  These are essentially a culmination of pictures and videos from all the people at one event. Users of the app submit their picture or video to the event story. The event could be a holiday, concert or even a snowstorm. The Snowmageddon snow storm of 2015 story reportedly got 27 million views on the app.

We were extremely exited to see a Snapchat election story for the UK election. Hundreds of people had submitted photos and videos of their voting experiences. Young voters got to share their first voting experience with the world, while others simply encouraged people to get out and vote. Either way this was an awesome use of technology to support democracy.

We also really liked the fact that the app stayed non-partisan. There was only one story topic and the submitted media was from voters. There were no advertisements or stories dedicated to a certain party. Below is one of the pictures we managed to snag from the Snapchat election story.