#StartupsEverywhere: Omaha, Neb.

#StartupsEverywhere: Heather Nelson, Founder & CEO, Poll The Vote

This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.

Building the digital public square, minus the negativity

Heather Nelson is a professor of management and  entrepreneurship  at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. After 23 years of guiding her students towards new and innovative ideas, she launched her own startup—Poll The Vote—to connect voters and constituents to their candidates and elected officials. We sat down to talk with Heather about her company, her approach to content moderation on her platform, and more.

Tell us about your background. What led you to Poll The Vote?

I’m a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where I teach management and entrepreneurship. I’ve spent 40 years of my professional life helping other people plan for, start and scale their businesses, and around April of 2022, I decided to start my own after not finding a solution for my own desire to interface digitally with my state senator. There was a bill debated in the Nebraska legislature around that time that became personal for my household and I. The way the hearing on that bill unfolded made me ask, ‘How do we, the (working class) people, meaningfully voice our sentiments and impact legislation creation?’ 

I decided that I needed to build a platform that digitally connects all American citizens to their representatives at every level of government. We now have users in 33 states and are building a grassroots enthusiasm between elected officials, constituents, and community advocacy leaders. It’s exciting to see the momentum build and see what’s possible with more users. 

What is the work you all are doing at Poll The Vote? Who are your users?

Poll The Vote is a social platform connecting American residents 18+ years of age  to their elected officials and connecting elected officials to the sentiments of their constituencies at large. We are facilitating civic and community engagement, making it easier—and faster—to get your sentiment in and have our elected officials make good, public opinion-informed policy decisions.

Elected officials have special accounts that allow them to have direct contact with their constituents and engage them en masse via communication tools in the form of surveys, newsletters, announcement posts, event calendaring, live town halls. Everyday citizens  get a curated and uninterrupted social feed from their elected officials, candidates seeking their vote, and organizations they choose to follow. Citizens can make their voice heard by signing petitions and participating in surveys on the platform. We don’t allow commenting on posts, and only accounts tied to elected officials, candidates, and organizations can post to citizens’ feeds.

We’re expanding who can communicate with whom and how they communicate over time. The plan is to expand Poll The Vote into a comprehensive community engagement platform. We’ve gotten a lot of interest from advocacy and civic organization groups, as well as churches, schools, businesses, and service organizations. 

Poll The Vote provides special accounts to candidates and elected officials so they can publicly communicate with their voters and constituents. How do you manage who can obtain these accounts and what they can say on the platform?

So far, everyone we’ve given those accounts to are people we’ve gone out and invited to join the platform.  There is going to be a day, however, where we’ll need to start looking at filings and digital footprints on our end after we receive applications from organizations and individuals. We also don’t allow officials and candidates to be negative towards each other on the platform. There’s no fighting on our platform; elected officials are encouraged to speak factually and true to their political platform, but they cannot describe another candidate as for or against something.  I’ve received several emails from users thanking us for not allowing negativity nor littering advertisements throughout.  

How do you protect the privacy of constituents and voters using your platform?

Right now, all of our public sentiment reporting is anonymized. We spent a lot of time when we first started out creating a pixelized avatar of each user that strips and separates all of their data, de-identifying it for advanced security measures. 

What has your experience been trying to get those in public office to use your product?

It’s hard to get approval in government procurement processes like this in part because technical literacy can vary so much between individuals in power. So far, I’ve met with the clerk for the Nebraska legislature as well as the office of the Speaker of the House. There’s been a lot of back and forth on requirements and expectations, and now, even though we’ve met all the requirements set in my meetings, we’re probably going to have to start over in January because the current Speaker is term-limited, and we’ll need approval from the new Speaker’s office.  

As Nebraska is historically known to be a red conservative state, I knew that it would take a little longer to gain the trust of our data let alone build up name awareness.  We started with sharing our early sentiment collection during the 2025 Nebraska legislature session equally with all 49 state senators to introduce our new platform on 3 hot topic bills (electoral college voting method, stand with women act and medical marijuana).  With each bill, users expanded across the State where by the end of our first session, we had Nebraskans on the platform representing all 49 state senator districts (70% sitting in rural Nebraska!) and 3 times observed senators using our data reports on the floor during live debate.  

2026 has been an excellent year for externally validating the platform.  Anne Meeker with PopVox Foundation publicly stated that our platform is one of the most promising innovations in the civic/gov tech space that she has seen.  This led to my demonstrating the platform in April on our 1,000th day of business to members of Congress’s Technology Modernization Initiative; where afterwards it was commented that they have not seen software that can collect sentiment in real time.  I am beginning the procurement application process after which, any member of the House of Representatives may use the platform for their constituent communication and engagement without needing to do additional due diligence. There is a separate application process to do business with the Senate that we will complete in tandem.

In July, we attended our first national conference in Chicago (National Conference of State Legislators) and came home with interest appointments from 5 states plus multiple candidates and organizations.  We are also observing state and national groups such as unions, lobbyists, PACs taking interest in our sentiment collection ability. I can’t impress enough that for any organization we work with, we will represent the data as it is received to align to our independent nonpartisan principles which means  sometimes the receiver of the insight reports will be excited while others may not see the data aligning to their mission as hoped.  

Are there any local, state, or federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?

Policymakers need to protect the government grant process from political jockeying. Nebraska has a state equivalent to the federal Small Business Innovation Research grant program under the Nebraska Business Innovation Act. Research from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln reported that for every state dollar invested in a Nebraska startup, it returned $16 back to the state. Despite this, our Governor shut down the funding in October of last year without warning. It took months of local organizing and advocacy to restore the funds. Government grants for innovation are a no-brainer, they keep talent local and innovation uninterrupted.

What are your goals for Poll The Vote moving forward?

I have a lot of ambition and vision for the future of Poll The Vote. I’d like to see mass adoption of the platform in every state and at every level of government from local to federal. I want elected officials to be able to go live on the platform and hold virtual town halls where we can collect sentiment on their performance in real time. I hope to see Poll The Vote become the go-to platform for form collection, survey polling, and petitioning, as well as have a meaningful impact on U.S. advocacy. 

All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.

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