Daily Brew: February 20, 2026
Welcome to the Friday, Feb. 20, Brew.
By: Briana Ryan
Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:
- Introducing a new Ballotpedia project for America’s 250th anniversary: “The Blueprints of Democracy”
- How Ballotpedia will celebrate America’s 250th Birthday, and introducing my new newsletter Civic Blueprints, by Leslie Graves, Ballotpedia Founder and CEO
- Three new measures have been certified for this year’s statewide ballots
Introducing a new Ballotpedia project for America’s 250th anniversary: “The Blueprints of Democracy”
Ballotpedia is marking America's 250th anniversary with a new initiative we've been building for months — and today marks our open house. We're calling it "The Blueprints of Democracy," and throughout 2026, we'll survey the structures, processes, rules, and human stories that make our civic life possible. This is the infrastructure that doesn't make headlines and rarely appears in civics textbooks — the load-bearing walls of government that hold everything up.
Along the way, we’ll share how our team of dedicated professionals and our outstanding national network of volunteers are working every day to make it easier for more people to get informed about and involved in the political process.
We're starting where government is closest to the people — local politics and elections. There are more than 500,000 local elected officials across the country, ranging from the mayors of major cities and trial court judges to those serving on school boards or special districts. But local offices are just the ground floor. As we celebrate America’s 250th year, we'll work our way across American politics, from local offices to state and federal government.
We’re familiar with many local offices — mayors, city and county council members, school board members, and so on. But local elected offices can sometimes include positions and governing bodies that many of us have never heard of before. Below is a sample of these types of positions and the unique circumstances we have encountered while gathering information about candidates seeking to serve in these posts.
Wyoming Improvement and Service Districts
These government subdivisions show how decentralized democracy can be, and how difficult it is to document. Several of these districts are holding elections on March 17, but unlike most local races, election information isn’t readily available at county election offices.
Instead, our local elections team has to contact the districts directly, many of which are extremely small and list only a personal phone number in their public notices, if even that. Sometimes it's just a home address.
When we call, officials are often surprised or wary. They’re not used to outside inquiries about their elections. In some cases, they refuse to give us information, and we must wait to see whether candidate details appear in later notices. In others, we reach voicemail, and sometimes the only way to get candidate information is through a follow-up text message to a board member’s personal cell phone.
A handful of districts contract out their election administration to consulting firms, which can simplify the process of how we gather and verify candidate information. Overall, however, these races require persistent, hands-on outreach just to confirm who is running.
Ohio’s Educational Service Centers (ESCs)
Ohio has 51 Educational Service Centers (ESCs) that provide regional support to school districts. But here's the catch: the ESC a school district contracts with for services is not always the ESC its voters elect. For example, we heard from a voter in Ohio’s Green Local School District, in Summit County. When they looked up information on Ballotpedia’s Sample Ballot Lookup Tool prior to voting, we showed them a Stark County ESC race because that's the ESC their school district contracts with. But due to historical boundaries, Green LSD voters actually vote in the Summit County ESC election, for an office that no longer serves them.
Untangling this required a county-by-county, precinct-level research effort to map which school districts vote in which ESC elections — work we're now using to rebuild more accurate election maps in our sample ballot tools.
California High Valleys Water District
Last year, we encountered an election in California for the High Valleys Water District, which uses a landowner-weighted voting system that departs sharply from the one-person-one-vote principle.
In an Aug. 26 election for seats on the water district’s board of directors, our local elections team had no trouble finding information about the candidates. But finding out the election results was a different story. The reason: each voter’s ballot is weighted by the assessed value of their property, meaning results are tabulated not by the number of votes cast, but by the total dollar value represented.
The final results list the winning candidates, Kathleen Blewish and Sam Hughes, not by vote count but by values exceeding $2.6 million and $2.8 million, respectively.
This is a far cry from the experience most of us have with elections. But these three examples show that government is often more complex and opaque than our textbooks taught us.
For more information on these elections, visit our America 250 page.
How Ballotpedia will celebrate America’s 250th Birthday, and introducing my new newsletter Civic Blueprints
This isn’t just a major election year, when tens of thousands of offices at every level of government will be decided. It’s also the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.
The celebrations, commemorations, and reflections on our country’s birth will be everywhere, and many will be cheering the fireworks, parades, and special events along with everyone else. In short, it will be an unforgettable birthday party celebrating the very best of what it is to be an American.
Ballotpedia will be celebrating, too, but in a different way. Rather than a parade, we’ll be taking our readers behind the scenes of American democracy, exploring the many, diverse, and sometimes quite complicated systems that make it all work.
We call this year-long project The Blueprints of Democracy, and you can read more about that project and the kinds of things we’ll be discussing throughout 2026 in this issue of the Brew.
And on a personal note — this will be my final Daily Brew column. It has been a genuine pleasure to give you a look behind the scenes at Ballotpedia, and I hope you’ve been able to get a better sense not only of how we gather the information you find in our newsletters, on our website, or in our Sample Ballot Lookup Tool, but also of why we do it and what our goals are for the future.
As for my own writing future, I’m launching a new Substack newsletter called Civic Blueprints. You can subscribe here to get weekly columns, podcasts, and more — and it’s all absolutely free.
In this new format, I’ll be writing and discussing my ideas about how democracy works, how it could work better, and what role we have to play in making it happen. As you can tell from the title, this new project will complement Ballotpedia's larger Blueprints of Democracy project. But it will go further, with discussions of books, ideas, controversies, culture, and some more behind-the-scenes insights about Ballotpedia’s present and future.
I look forward to continuing our conversation — and thank you for reading!
Three new measures have been certified for this year’s statewide ballots
As of Feb. 18, the 69 measures certified for statewide ballots in 2026 are above the historical average for this point in the cycle across even-numbered years from 2014 through 2024.
By this time during even-numbered years from 2014 through 2024, an average of 57 statewide measures had been certified for the ballot. From 2014 to 2024, an average of 153 statewide measures were certified in even-numbered years.
Over the past two weeks, three new measures were certified for the Nov. 3 ballot in their respective states:
- Indiana Bailable Offenses and Substantial Risk Standard Amendment
- New Mexico Board of Regents Nominating Committees Amendment
- New Mexico Establish Salary for State Legislators Amendment
Signatures have been submitted and are pending verification for five initiatives:
- Alaska Citizenship Requirement for Voting Initiative
- Maine Birth Certificate Sex Requirement for Public School Sports Initiative
- Missouri Congressional Map Referendum
- Oklahoma State Question 836, Top-Two Primary Elections Initiative
- Utah Eliminate the Independent Redistricting Commission Initiative
Enough signatures were verified for 13 indirect initiatives to certify them to their respective state legislatures:
- Massachusetts Change State Tax Revenue Limit Initiative
- Massachusetts Decrease State Income Tax Rate to 4% Initiative
- Massachusetts Eliminate Recreational Marijuana Sales and Allow Limited Possession Initiative
- Massachusetts Establish the Nature for All Fund Initiative
- Massachusetts Legislative Stipend Calculation and Payment Rules Initiative
- Massachusetts Limit on Required Lot Size for Single-Family Homes Initiative
- Massachusetts Permit Collective Bargaining for Committee for Public Counsel Services Employees Initiative
- Massachusetts Permit Same-Day Voter Registration Initiative
- Massachusetts Public Records Requirements for Legislature and Governor’s Office Initiative
- Massachusetts Rent Control Initiative
- Massachusetts Top-Two Primary Elections Initiative
- Washington Limit Participation in Female Sports to Students Verified as Biologically Female Initiative
- Washington Parental Right to Review Education Materials, Receive Notifications, and Opt Out of Sexual-Health Education Initiative
The next signature deadline is April 1 in Idaho, where initiatives related to the sales tax, abortion, medical marijuana, and recreational marijuana have been approved for signature gathering.
Click here for more information about the ballot measures that could be on the ballot this year.
