What is Elect 535?

Elect535 provides a single source to find, research, and support candidates for the US Senate and House of Representatives who reflect your values and priorities, enabling you to influence races throughout the country. Creating a“dream team” to support, with your dollars and your time, is as easy as booking a flight, all done conveniently from your desktop.  
 

Our Values and Mission

Elect 535 is dedicated to activating citizens to learn about and support candidates for Congress that support their values. We are a progressive organization and at this time in our nation's histor, believe that candidates of the Democratic party as well as many independents are a necessary change in order to improve the multiple crises afflicting the US.  
 

The Folks Behind Elect 535

The Elect 535 tool was created by a team of concerned citizens turned activists after the 2016 elections.  We met through an Indivisible group that formed in Lexington, MA, the birthplace of American Democracy.   We concluded that if we truly wanted to improve the quality of government, we needed to change who represented us in Congress.  We are researchers and analysts by training, so we researched candidates, not just in our own district, but across the country, and created tools to analyze races and candidates.  We used these to help our groups select candidates to support and we decided we should make these tools and data available for everyone.  We are united in the desire to restore our democracy by building 21st century tools to educate and enable citizens about the candidates that will represent all of us.

The Founding Team

Michelle Olson (CEO) founded IA out of her fervent belief that in order to restore the health of our democracy the current composition of the US Congress must be changed. She co-founded Minuteman Indivisible in 2017 and is one of the lead organizers of the Indivisible MA coalition.  Her focus has been on the 2018 electoral strategy including statewide electoral strategies workshops and working with other groups in developing their electoral efforts. Michelle is a former Wall Street strategist and entrepreneur, with an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School. 

Rina Schneur (CIO) is a research lead at Minuteman Indivisible and launched a Moms Demand Action for Gun Safety group in 2017. Rina is a Data Scientist, was a director of Business Analytics at Verizon, and co-founded Emptoris, Inc. She is the former president of Informs, an analytics professional organization.  She holds an MSc and PhD from MIT.

And a Team of Many!  We have a team of over 20 volunteers: developers, product designers, writers, and researchers. They have generously donated their services to bring Elect535 to reality. They come to this project with impressive and diverse professional backgrounds. All are dedicated to restoring our democracy and generously give their time in that effort.

For more information please contact us at info@elect535.org

The Elect535 tool is owned by 435 Labs Inc., a benefit corporation located in Lexington, MA.

You can send written correspondance to:
435 Labs, Inc.
5 Castle Road
Lexington MA 02420