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
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?
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...
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?
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
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