How Ballotpedia Is Filling Gaps in Local Elections Coverage

If you’ve spent any time researching local U.S. elections in the last few years, you’ve likely come across Ballotpedia.

The site was founded in 2007 as a visitor-edited encyclopedia, then focused on ballot measures—propositions, initiatives, and referenda that let voters change the law. “It’s like Wikipedia, except it’s for ballot stuff,” explained an early “About” page.

It’s since quietly evolved into a professionally reported and edited non-profit newsroom and database. Ballotpedia has 80 full-time, geographically distributed staffers and a smaller number of contractors and volunteers, who turn out articles, newsletters, podcasts, and datasets about U.S. elections, candidates, and legislation. The site is a favorite of politics wonks: Ballotpedia data and reporting are cited in hundreds of scholarly articles and tens of thousands of media reports per year. But it also caters to ordinary voters looking for election information in a country with more than half-a-million elected officials and an ever-shrinking local press to cover them.

“Not every country elects things like coroners, mosquito control boards, and library boards,” said Geoff Pallay, Ballotpedia’s editor-in-chief since 2015. “There’s just a lot of individuals running in elections in America every year, and our goal is to cover all of them.”

The site’s mission wasn’t always so all-encompassing. Founder and current CEO Leslie Graves, a government transparency advocate, initially wanted to help inform citizens about the more mysterious parts of government. Ballotpedia was all about ballot measures, while a sister operation, WikiFOIA, helped users learn about state-level FOIA laws, and another operation called Judgepedia focused on the judiciary, before being absorbed by Ballotpedia in 2015. The site’s editors assumed readers could turn elsewhere for information about regular elections. Eventually they realized voters wanted a single destination to learn about everyone and everything they could vote for. Ballotpedia added congressional elections in 2012 (when high traffic brought the site to its knees),  presidential races in 2016, and candidate surveys first popped up in 2017. The 2020 election set traffic records for the site, which saw more than 95 million unique visitors that year.

Ballotpedia’s infrastructure has improved over time, including the addition of a database of electoral information that makes it easy to add charts and graphs to the site. All that data is also available for researcher access via API (meaning they can easily write code to fetch it on demand), and “data sales” made up 23 percent of the organization’s $9.4 million annual revenue as of its most recent annual report. “Political data is used for an array of projects, including issue advocacy, marketing, scholarly research, and much more!” the site tells would-be buyers.

Ballotpedia’s anyone-can-contribute policy was curtailed beginning in the early 2010s. Site management, tired of mediating the inevitable political flame wars between contributors, began allowing only vetted users to make changes, then switched to the professional model. Staffers—who have worked remotely from the site’s early days—receive regular training on keeping political biases out of their work for the site, which its job postings call a “neutral oasis” in an era of “sensational posts.” 

Though the site received 40 percent of its revenue from donors, 7 percent from ad sales, and another 20 percent from grant funding as of its latest report, its policies say editorial decisions are “are made independently through our editorial process and not on the basis of donor support or advertising clients.” Ballotpedia doesn’t give endorsements and eschews judgments on hot button topics it covers like election legislation such as voter ID laws, police training and discipline requirements, or education policy. The site has attracted thousands of responses to the surveys it sends candidates, which provide mini-profiles of sometimes otherwise obscure office-seekers online. Answering Ballotpedia’s questionnaire has become a standard part of campaigning for many, in part through its studied neutrality, Pallay said.

The site’s writers cover federal and state offices, and every race in the biggest 100 cities in the U.S. (including any jurisdictions, big or small, residents can vote in, from counties to soil conservation districts). They also write and update articles on recall votes, active and proposed laws regulating voting, Supreme Court cases, school board elections, and a growing number of other types of local races.

While some features are aimed at political pros and researchers, others are designed with  ordinary voters in mind. A feature called the Elections Help Desk addresses FAQs about the electoral process itself. Ballotpedia just announced a deal with election result provider Decision Desk HQ to share real-time results and race calls during 2024 elections. The site reaches voters in innovative ways, from working with Amazon to share accurate information via Alexa during the 2018 election cycle to operating newsletters, which Pallay said reach some readers who hadn’t otherwise visited the site. Ballotpedia also has an active presence on Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and recently unveiled a “Content Creator Toolkit” that allows influencers to share voter information and election reminders with their followers. 

“Because our content can be so academic and niche, and we don’t have any partisan lean, we are actively working to provide first-time-voter-friendly content so new voters feel like they have a support system when they are making important decisions,” wrote Abigail Campbell, a communications manager at Ballotpedia, in an email. “We want to actively work to reach a younger, social media-savvy audience while keeping our core readers happy and engaged.” 

 One special team focuses on making understandable what the organization calls “marquee elections”—high-profile races like those that can flip control of state houses.

“We always try to think about, if someone was only going to read this page for 30 seconds to get the absolute bare minimum information, make sure that’s at the top,” said Joel Williams, a team lead on the Marquee Team. “We worry about the rest after that.”

A major challenge as the site expands, is that there is no official, national database of all candidates or elections. Some state election officials post comprehensive lists of candidates and voting dates online and the Federal Election Commission documents Congressional and presidential races. But many elections take place almost entirely offline, especially in smaller jurisdictions where voters may just be notified by mail that it’s time to come to the polls. 

“Believe it or not we’ve come across situations where no true announcement takes place, and an election just kind of occurs,” Pallay said.

Recall votes, too, can take place with little notice outside the jurisdictions where they’re held.

“We do try to cover every recall in the US, but we can only cover what we know about,” said Abbey Smith, a team lead on Ballotpedia’s Elections Team. “If something is not in the news, we just don’t have the ability to know that, because we’re not in every city.” 

Although Ballotpedia has made an ongoing effort to increase coverage of down-ballot races in areas “where local coverage is almost nonexistent,” as founder and CEO Leslie Graves wrote in the organization’s annual report, it can’t replace on-the-ground reporting. Ballotpedia regularly cites and relies on local journalism in its articles.

Ballotpedia researchers will reach out to people running for office to remind them to take candidate surveys, and they’ll compile information like notable endorsements, campaign finance summaries, and candidate websites and photos. But they don’t pose questions to candidates about policies or deploy reporters to cover campaign events and local board meetings the way traditional local media would. Nor does the site fact-check candidate survey responses. “Ballotpedia relies on the integrity of candidates to be honest and does not perform background checks or fact-checks on their responses,” according to an FAQ page.  

However, the site’s electoral data and encyclopedic bent provides information that local reporters working on deadline wouldn’t otherwise have on hand about past races in a state or the arcane details of election law. It’s a symbiotic relationship, Pallay said, where local reporters turn to Ballotpedia for historical stats and legal facts, while Ballotpedia cites local media’s on-the-ground coverage.

 Research indicates that the disappearance of local news coverage has a detrimental effect on elections. One 2018 paper from The Journal of Politics found, unsurprisingly, that voters’ electoral knowledge and participation ebbed as local political coverage declined. 

“We often see lower levels of voter turnout, lower levels of interest in politics, and lower levels of political knowledge,” said Jennifer L. Lawless, a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Virginia and one of the paper’s authors. 

Such changes can meaningfully impact election results, said Zachary Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. Incumbents are more likely to win re-election and run unopposed, and voters are more likely to vote a straight Democratic or Republican ticket, instead of individually picking candidates for each office on the ballot, he said. And while local news startups and nonprofits are picking up some of the slack from shrinking and closing papers, they are less likely to be on-the-ground in rural and suburban locales. Where new local outlets do exist, they often don’t command the same level of readership that newspapers delivered to readers’ doors once did, Metzger said. 

 Reaching everyday readers is an issue that Ballotpedia is keenly aware of.

“There’s just so many ways for people to consume information,” Pallay said. “They don’t just go Google for it anymore.”

Ballotpedia must keep up with where the public is looking for news and information—as well as ever-shifting search and social media algorithms that may deprioritize particular sources or political content entirely.

“I think that the data that are provided there and the real time updates that Ballotpedia offers are vital and critical, especially for anybody that’s interested in following local elections,” said Lawless, who has used the site in her own research. “The problem, of course, is that you have to know to go to Ballotpedia.”