Ballot Explained explains your ballot before you vote.

Most voter guides assume you already know what election you’re voting in, which districts you live in, which candidates are on your ballot, and where to find the official version. That’s a lot to ask of someone who just wants to vote.

The problem

A single county can have dozens of distinct ballot styles. Two neighbors on the same street can receive different ballots because a municipal boundary runs between their houses. The voter is expected to work this out on their own — find the election website, locate a voter lookup, download a PDF, and then research a dozen names they’ve never encountered.

The result is predictable. Turnout falls sharply toward the bottom of the ballot, where the offices that most directly affect daily life sit: the board that sets your property tax rate, the official who runs the county jail, the body that governs your schools.

The approach

Start from the ballot, not from a generic list of candidates. Enter an address, get the actual set of contests, and get a plain explanation of every one — including what each office can and cannot do.

Ballot resolution is deterministic: official boundary files and statutory election schedules decide it. AI is used only to explain an answer we already have, never to produce one. Where we aren’t confident, we say so — that’s a feature, not a gap.

The line we don’t cross

Ballot Explained does not tell you who to vote for. It does not rank, score, grade, or endorse candidates, and it never will under this product definition. Candidates appear in ballot order, always.

A tool that quietly nudges people is worse than no tool at all. The entire value here rests on being trustworthy to someone who disagrees with whoever built it.

How it’s paid for

The consumer product is free. It is supported by advertising and sponsorship, and by white-label deployments for newsrooms, libraries, universities, and civic organizations that want to run a voter guide for their own audience.

Sponsors cannot influence research. There is no mechanism by which they could — ballot order is fixed and no candidate score exists to adjust. Those rules are published.

Where this is

This is an early build covering all 50 states and the District of Columbia for the November 3, 2026 general election. Address resolution and office explanations are live nationwide. Candidate research is published race by race, after filing closes and after review — not generated on demand.