RALEIGH — When Andrew Tripp left the General Assembly for a job working at the UNC System, he also added the title of entrepreneur.
A lawyer by trade, Tripp worked in private practice before joining the Senate Rules Committee staff working for former Sen. Tom Apodaca and eventually becoming chief of staff to Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger (R-Eden).
It was during his time at the legislature interacting with elected officials and staff as well as working with prospective candidates that an idea about helping ease the burden of campaign finance compliance was born.
“One common denominator I saw was that there’s a whole part of being in an elected office that not many people pay much attention to except during campaign cycles,” said Tripp in an interview with North State Journal.
“Fundraising and campaign finance reporting make those campaigns go whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or a Libertarian or anybody, you’ve got an obligation under the law to be transparent about the money coming in and going out of your campaign.”
Tripp said he saw a problem with how campaign finance reporting in the state led to candidates making mistakes with filings that were not out of malice, but due to complexities with state-mandated forms and software.
“To see people who were gutsy enough to put their hands up to seek office and then be stymied by a software that when you compare it to the retail user, a retail consumer software that is everywhere now on their phone… you can get groceries within an hour on the click of the phone. If you compare that experience with what the software we have right now is, you just have to ask a question, can’t we do better?”
Tripp’s question would lead to the creation of his company named Electafile.
He says the company is designed to make it easier for all of those involved in campaigns to have a simple platform to report information that they’re legally required to disclose.
“We all have ideas of, ‘hey, wouldn’t it be great if,’ and then the idea never gets off go. In the case of electrifying my ideas, can’t we have a platform that is like the stuff we see in our phone to buy groceries or file our federal taxes? That was the idea,” Tripp said.
He adds that his wife, Lora, encouraged him to talk to someone to figure out what it could look like.
That led to a meeting with a company in the software and web development space called Dark Horse Solutions to help articulate the idea and how it would get built.
Tripp would learn new terms in the software space, like how software begins with a mockup and wire frames. That process leads to visual depictions of the website going page by page and making granular adjustments.
Once the adjustments are right, the platform then goes into development and a testing environment.
That involved early morning phone calls for nearly two years and constantly gathering feedback from campaign professionals and treasurers across the state.
“I didn’t realize is just how much work goes into putting the website or the app that you see on your phone, all the behind the scenes work that goes into building it out and making sure it works,” Tripp said of the process.
His family also got in on the process.
During the testing phase of development, his kids helped the family dog, Winnie, run for “nearly every office in North Carolina except dogcatcher,” joked Tripp.
To uncover problems and improve how Electafile would operate, he told his kids to try and “break” the site going through all types of scenarios.
“We had Winnie for Senate, Winnie for North Carolina, Winnie for court, county commissioner, uh, and that was always the name we used, which was a lot of good fun to where the developers, one day came back and said, who is Winnie? She’s very politically active,” said Tripp with a laugh.
In the span of nearly three years, the company has gone from idea to being used in a number of campaigns and political action committees.
The first report filed using Electafile was submitted in July 2022 and has steadily expanded its user base in the year and a half since.
Tripp said he feels gratified when someone new tries out the platform and tells him how much it helps. He said one campaign treasurer told him she nearly tried tears of joy when she realized how much easier Electafile was to use.
“The attention in most media circles is who’s giving money, who’s spending, but the actual reporting of that – there’s statutes and penalties involved,” said Tripp. “I don’t think it gets the kind of attention that maybe it deserves. We try to be accommodating and mission-focused on helping people who are brave enough to put their hand up and try to get into politics.”
