Show HN: OpenBallot, Aggregated SF/California Voter Guides | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: OpenBallot, Aggregated SF/California Voter Guides

openballot.app

38 pointsdaisystanton16 comments

A group of us (democracy-passionate friends) just launched OpenBallot, a platform of 40+ voter guides. The goal is to save you research time by showing you all the endorsements and explanations you care about in one place. You can use this to fill out your ballot, which is private by default. You can then share with friends or publish your views on our platform.

The site is our first prototype; if you're in SF, please try it and share your feedback! We're hoping to use this to eventually scale to all over the country.

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How can people contribute new guides?

I've thought about doing basically this exact project a number of times. The biggest thing I'd wanna change is to not focus on the guides so much. Lots of organizations are shy about making an endorsement so guides can often be pretty barebones. A much more useful view, imo, would be to allow users to select a number of voter guides, and then view a full ballot. With badges by the choices endorsed by whatever guides they have activated

Yeah, that's what we do! Try logging in and following your favorite guides; from there you'll see your "ballot view" that (I think) describes exactly what you're after? More whitespace than I'd like (compact view or die!), but I was outnumbered ;-)

Two options to contribute new guides: 1) Tweet https://x.com/OpenBallotApp with the guide URL, or 2) join our Discord and post in #guides-wishlist: https://discord.gg/mzubN2v4

We'd love to hear from you!

>Lots of organizations are shy about making an endorsement so guides can often be pretty barebones.

Then that's a bad voter guide. A voter guide should be about offering context and not just a binary cheat sheet of endorse/not endorse, yes/no, red/blue, etc.

A good guide should explain the issues (from the specific perspective of the group preparing the guide) regardless of the ultimate suggestion. The primary guide I used (for LA not SF) was over 60 pages to explain their perspective and reasoning on everything. It also used language like "enthusiastically endorse", "endorse", "strongly recommend", "recommend", and "no recommendation" to give degrees to their suggestions.

I would personally ignore any of the guides on OpenBallot which provide no explanation for their votes. It might even be a good idea for OpenBallot to require explanations. What value is someone's recommendation if they can't tell you why that is their recommendation?

These are great suggestions; thank you!

Care to share the LA guide?

I'm happy to share it, but I'll admit I didn't include the name in my original comment because the source will get some people riled up. I was referring to the guide from LA's chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.[1] I think it stands up as an example of an extremely well put together guide regardless of your political affiliation.

As a progressive person, I used a combination of that and The Knock LA's voter guide[2] to get the progressive perspective and then I combined that with Ballotpedia[3] to get a non-partisan view, see more mainstream endorsements, and campaign finance details (California often has too many confusing ballot measures, so when in doubt looking at who paid how much to support a proposition is my usual tiebreaker).

[1] - https://dsa-la.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/DSA-LA-2024-Ge...

[2] - https://knock-la.com/the-knock-la-progressive-voter-guide-fo...

[3] - https://ballotpedia.org/California_elections,_2024

Yeah, love these.

In my ideal world we'll add icons for things like "does this need to be a proposition" (i.e. bond-funded measures; some pension props), a visual indicator of the $$ at stake (state/municipal assessment if necessary), progress bars for how much campaign money was spent on each prop/candidate (a nice proxy for how contentious something is).

What other metadata do you think could be useful?

This is really cool and I appreciate the concept. I was pleased to see a friend’s voter guide listed however I was sad to see that the opinions that he had thoughtfully articulated in the email version of his guide are not present here. This is really a loss since he had provided good reasons. If I am being honest, this tool is only helpful if it offers detailed justifications for every position.

Thanks so much!

The guides that we ingested (from source) all capture exactly what content was available upon ingestion time (we don't yet have a way to monitor for changes and auto-refresh, but we're working on that). Those have a "verified" checkmark to show that they've been QA'd by us.

If your friend authored the guide, it means he hasn't (yet?) put his own reasons in. I'd definitely reach out to him and encourage him to add them, since I agree with you that that's what makes this kind of tool really great!

If you think there's some kind of bug / problem, please do join or Discord (I'll edit the post to include it) or just call us out on Twitter. We're very keen to resolve anything that doesn't seem right: https://x.com/OpenBallotApp

Thanks so much for the feedback!

So this is a directory of partisan voter guides?

Sorry. I moved from CA to NY and that’s all we have here. It’s a nightmare to just figure out what’s on the ballot.

Californians have an excellent non-partisan voter guide for over 25 years:

https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/

Nice idea. Oregon has fantastic voter pamphlets with candidate-supplied bios, as well as for/against ads that people can buy.

Sample: https://www.washingtoncountyor.gov/elections/current-voters-...

Super neat!

A count at the top of each item would be cool (ie quick glance see counts of yes / no, maybe shaded by party affiliation?)

On mobile I wouldn’t miss follow profile / like comment, at least as a casual user when scrolling through a prop.

I think that a tally of endorsements or partisan affiliation is counter productive. That is just a bias toward whichever side had the most interest groups pushing an agenda. Democracy works best when people think for themselves. We defer to the majority opinion after all the votes are tallied and not before.

Thanks so much for the feedback!

Yeah, echoing another comment: we tried so many rounds of tallies/counts, because visual summaries are so useful from a UX perspective. But there are so many things that quickly start looking partisan. For example: we want to both a) be inclusive and let anyone share their choices as a voter guide, and b) not have visual summaries be a reflection of whatever biased population of users might be using OpenBallot at any time. (Some users gave us early feedback that they thought the visual summary was OpenBallot's recommendation of how they should vote, which we definitely didn't want.)

In general, we're being really conservative with UI atm because we don't want to put ourselves in the position of doing any editorializing that smells partisan. (We even have two sorting methods for guides, one of which is "random", because it's tricky to balance making the big-name guides that people expect discoverable vs hard-coding a sorting method, which we'd prefer not to do, since even that feels partisan).

We've got reams of detailed examples of these types of problems, so if anyone is interested, jump in on Discord! :-)

Awesome!

And everyone make sure you’re registered to vote: https://vote.gov/

So cool!

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