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.

Who’s behind it

Ballot Explained is built and run by one independent developer in the United States. It is not affiliated with any political party, campaign, candidate or government office. None of them funds it, and none of them has any say in what it publishes.

The same person reviews the research before it is published and answers the mail. Corrections and questions go to hello@ballotexplained.com, and how the research is done is set out in the methodology.

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.

Readers can also chip in. If the guide helped you, you can help keep it free on Ko-fi. A tip buys nothing — no access, no influence, no different treatment for anyone on the ballot.

What it covers

All 50 states and the District of Columbia, for the November 3, 2026 general election. Every U.S. Senate race, every governor’s race, all 435 U.S. House districts, every statewide ballot measure and every state’s appellate court contests are researched in advance against published sources — you can read any of them without entering an address, from the races and measures pages.

Local contests — county commission, sheriff, school board, city council — number in the tens of thousands, so they are researched the first time someone asks about one and kept for everyone after them. Those pages say so, and say when the research could not establish something.