Severe Error Log

As we work to build the Encyclopedia of American Politics, we gather feedback from readers, elected officials, and partner organizations. Through these interactions, and our quality assurance practices, we catch and correct errors daily throughout our hundreds of thousands of pages.

We believe transparency in this endeavor is important to maintain the trust of our millions of readers. Because of this, we've historically published a log of significant errors and resulting systems that were enacted to prevent similar mistakes.

We sincerely appreciate readers who take the time to report errors. All concerns can be sent to Ballotpedia by emailing editor@ballotpedia.org. Our quality assurance team reviews every report and email.

Severe Error tracking

Ballotpedia classifies an error as severe if it is factually incorrect or otherwise has the potential to mislead a reader. We continuously track errors found by our content teams, quality assurance teams, and those reported by readers.

Year	Reader-reported severe errors per 1 million pages viewed
2016	4.65
2017	10.05
2018	6.75
2019	5.14
2020	2.07
2021	2.01
2022	1.15
2023	3.16
2024	1.66

Errors of note

The following entries detail the situations when Ballotpedia learned we needed to make significant changes to our processes and documentation to prevent future similar errors from occurring again. These cases happen in response to unique election laws, data availability, and directly submitted misinformation.

2020

Nevada Supreme Court election

Error: Additional Supreme Court candidate listed on general election ballot

Resolution: Update Ballotpedia.org and internal documentation regarding unique election laws

After Nevada’s 2020 primary elections, Ballotpedia listed two candidates as advancing to the Nevada Supreme Court general election, one with 57.4% of the vote, and one with 22.3%. We were contacted by the Secretary of State’s office to advise us of a state statute that says that if a nonpartisan candidate for a judicial seat receives over 50% at the Primary election, they are placed on the General Election ballot, unopposed.

Ballotpedia updated our relevant pages and noted this in our internal documentation tracking unique election laws by state.

The Andrew Walz hoax candidacy

See also: Ballotpedia: The Andrew Walz hoax candidacy

Error: Created article for fictional candidate and included in externally shared data

Resolution: Require proof of filed candidacy before article creation

A candidate survey was submitted to Ballotpedia on December 21, 2019, by a candidate named “Andrew Walz”. Along with this survey, he shared his campaign website and social media profiles and declared he was running for Rhode Island’s First Congressional District. We published Walz's profile on December 24, 2019.

Through a partnership with Twitter, we provide them with lists of candidates once a week. They use these as part of their verification process for candidates. Twitter then verified Walz’s Twitter account and provided him with an election label, noting his run for office.

On February 27, 2020, CNN reached out to Ballotpedia. They had been contacted by a student stating that the candidate profile was not legitimate. The student had made up the identity. We put a notice on the profile page while we investigated.

Many candidates generate campaign activities, such as establishing an online presence, far in advance of their states’ filing deadlines. Because of that, we had historically observed a category of “declared candidate” versus an “officially filed candidate.”

In the lists we submitted to Twitter, we did not distinguish between candidates who meet our definition of “declared” versus candidates who have filed/registered their candidacy with a campaign finance agency.

Due to this hoax, we no longer list declared candidates until we obtain proof of their official candidacy.

See also: FAQs regarding proof of official candidacy

The false Candidate Connection survey responses for Robert Boettcher

Error: Survey responses submitted by person impersonating candidate uploaded to candidate profile

Resolution: Implemented a verification process for candidate submissions.

On December 31, 2019, a Candidate Connection survey was submitted for Robert Boettcher. On January 7, 2020, Robert Boettcher emailed Ballotpedia to alert us that the survey responses on his page were not submitted by himself nor his campaign. We removed the survey from Boettcher's profile and decided to add a new verification layer to our process.

Before this situation, we had 3,000 responses submitted over three years without any incidents like this one. We had assumed that candidates would not submit false surveys and that if they did the fraudulent survey would be immediately and apparently obvious.

See this review of adversarial thinking.

We built and began testing a survey verification system on January 8, 2020, and took that system live on January 10, 2020. From January through April 2020, we processed and verified almost 2,000 candidates. We continued to modify that system to make it even more secure, including accepting verifications through official Twitter accounts and a partnership with Truepic Vision.

After submitting a survey response, candidates must do one of the following:

• Post a public tweet from an official campaign account mentioning the completion of the survey. This account must meet certain criteria to be accepted as verification.
• Send us photo identification through the photo verification mobile app Vision by Truepic Vision.

See also: How we verify Candidate Connection survey responses & Ballotpedia teams up with Truepic to help verify candidates' identities

Removal of filed Wisconsin candidate profiles

Error: Removed profiles of current candidates for office

Resolution: Adjusted process of reviewing Wisconsin Campaign Finance Information System

Ballotpedia creates candidate profiles for elections before the official filing deadline passes. To accomplish this, Ballotpedia looks to see whether a federal or state candidate has registered with their respective campaign finance agency.

In Wisconsin, our team checked for candidates under the Wisconsin Campaign Finance Information System’s filed reports. We removed candidates listed on our site who did not appear on that list. After a candidate notified us about wrongfully being removed from Ballotpedia, we called the Wisconsin agency and learned that the “Filed Reports” view only listed candidates who had filed a campaign finance report. Those who filed to run were listed on a separate “Filed Registrants” page.

Four candidate profiles were wrongfully removed due to this error: William Davis III, Jessica Katzenmeyer, Paul Piotrowski, and Walt Stewart.

We reinstated the profile pages and updated our internal processes and our public page to direct people to the correct report for verifying official candidate filings in Wisconsin.

See also: Ballotpedia: How we research for proof of official candidacy & Ballotpedia: FAQs regarding proof of official candidacy

2019

Unique Hawaii election law

Error: Marked candidates as disqualified

Resolution: Update Ballotpedia.org and internal documentation regarding unique election laws

After Hawaii’s primary election, we updated candidate profiles to note those who would not be appearing on the general election ballot. If a candidate did not lose in a primary but was not appearing in the general election, we noted that they were disqualified from the general election ballot.

Hawaii does not have an open primary. We learned that Hawaii’s nonpartisan candidates can only be voted on with a straight nonpartisan ballot, but are not considered a political voting bloc. They must either attain 10% of the vote or receive more votes than a candidate from a registered political party to advance.

We updated the profiles of these candidates who did not advance to the general election to say that they lost in the primary instead of saying they were disqualified. We also noted this in our internal documentation tracking unique election laws by state.

2018

Candidate list order changes

Error: Included party with no candidates above parties running candidates in elections

Resolution: Standardized candidate list order on Ballotpedia.org

Our page on the 2018 New York gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election listed each party with the candidate list beneath each party heading. In this case, a reader pointed out to us that we had listed a party with no declared candidates above a party that did have a candidate in the race.

We agreed with the reader’s complaint that this may appear biased and made changes to how we displayed the candidate list in that race. We then changed our processes and wrote new internal documentation standardizing our candidate list order to help maintain neutrality and consistency across the site.

In the “Candidates” section about a partisan general election, Ballotpedia lists the incumbent first (if applicable). Then, candidates (specifically non-write-in candidates) are listed by major party, alphabetically (both in terms of the order of the parties and the order of the candidates by last name), followed by third parties, alphabetically, and independents. Parties only display if there are candidates running under that party. Write-in candidates are listed last, regardless of party affiliation (exception: if they are the incumbent, they are listed first). This is now done automatically, powered by Ballotpedia’s API.

Pennsylvania redistricting changes and errors in our Sample Ballot Lookup Tool

Error: Using incorrect maps for elections during redistricting process

Resolution: Added disclaimers for all relevant districts

In 2018, Pennsylvania held two congressional special elections. Though recent congressional redistricting was completed and new maps were released, these two special elections were being held under the old maps so that the winners would be able to serve out the remainder of the vacant terms—November through January. The regularly scheduled elections were being held under the new maps.

Ballotpedia had already uploaded the new maps into our system, so voters in the special election districts (as designated by the old maps) did not see those elections when they entered their address in Ballotpedia’s sample ballot lookup tool. Because of the way we built the sample ballot, we were unable to account for a situation like this, and we were unable to figure out a technical solution before the election took place. To notify our readers, we added a disclaimer that would appear for voters looking up their ballots with an address within the seven new districts that had parts of the old District 7 or old District 15.

See also: Redistricting in Pennsylvania