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The Blueprints of Democracy: How Ballotpedia is celebrating America's 250th birthday (February 2026)

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Celebrating America's 250th
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February 20, 2026

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 pages.

Related resources

Footnotes

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