The State of Ballotpedia, 2018
Dear fellow Ballotpedians,
Over a decade ago, the front page of Ballotpedia.org came to life. A small, welcoming note greeted visitors and invited them to the “information clearinghouse” of American politics.
You are one of the millions of readers who have found their way to the website over the last 11 years. A group comprising many different interests, ideologies, and professions, you came in search of clarity and facts. You read Ballotpedia articles. And you read a lot.
As of today, September 7, 2018, we have recorded nearly one billion page views on the 278,076 articles on our site.
You’re in great company. We are honored to work alongside readers like you who are so supportive, engaging, and oriented toward truth. This shared pursuit of knowledge will strengthen the foundations of the political institutions we study at Ballotpedia.
In order to grow and improve Ballotpedia for you, we’ve built our organization to value close-knit teams, well-crafted processes, and a love of knowledge. We’re committed to delivering high-quality, neutral content to our information-hungry readers.
As I write today, the atmosphere outside of Ballotpedia.org is less organized. Citizens are scrambling to find facts among incomplete, confusing, or purposefully misleading information delivered to them everywhere they turn.
Because of all this, I think it is important for you to know more about Ballotpedia’s strategy for 2018 and beyond.
Our database
Over a million data points can be found in our quarter of a million articles.
A few years ago, we recognized the need to be able to better harness the power of that data and have the ability to use it to answer complex questions. Our team developed an API—an interface allowing readers to interact with Ballotpedia’s data and bring it into action.
This API now powers our sample ballot lookup tool (which has been used 849,287 times in 2018 alone), adds information to articles, and is used in our original analysis (see our recent competitiveness tracking report and wave election analysis).
We recently released Version 3.0 of the API, which expanded the types of information we can easily export and share with our readers.
Now, those data points can be used in many ways—by Ballotpedia and by other organizations that seek to share facts and reduce misinformation with their own audiences.
Expanding accuracy in the media
Do you sometimes wish that more people had access to Ballotpedia as a source for verifiable and accurate facts? As we continue to make our site even better for our current and future readers, we are also making Ballotpedia’s content more accessible by streamlining its integration onto other organizations’ platforms.
This aligns with Ballotpedia’s overall mission to seek out those ways we can best lend our insight.
According to a study by the Pew Research Center, in 2017 two-thirds of adults in the United States got their news from social media. Ballotpedia’s content can provide the resources for readers to evaluate what they see on these channels.
Facebook’s platform has connected millions of Americans with the news and community they seek; in an effort to provide a resource to readers, we are providing Facebook with a way for our encyclopedic content to be accessed in a streamlined fashion. Our neutral, sourced, and accurate content will allow Facebook’s readers to come to their own conclusions, and it will open up a new audience for Ballotpedia’s fact-seeking community.
Ballotpedia will provide Facebook with information and analysis of this year’s marquee elections along with who the candidates are in those elections. Ballotpedia is equipping Facebook with the same data you have access to and expanding the impact of our sourced, accurate content. (We are not providing Facebook with any information about our readers.)
Ballotpedia has another opportunity to bring our content to the Twitter platform, where we can verify the names and Twitter handles of candidates in certain general election races that Twitter is watching. Twitter can then invite those candidates to include a descriptive label on their interactions, verifying candidate identities.
Our future
We are keenly aware that our unique position as a nonpartisan purveyor of facts relies heavily on our ability to reach and evangelize readers. We are here because of—and to serve—you, our readers. You are our anchor as we look beyond Ballotpedia's current horizon and work to share facts far and wide.
There are over 507,000 elected officials in the United States, and we want to cover them all. As we continue to explore opportunities to partner with and share our data, we do so with the hope that it will allow us to expand our coverage for you and provide unbiased information about politics to more Americans. Today, we provide a comprehensive sample ballot full of candidate information to 60 million people. Next, let’s make that 100 million.
As we continue to expand, we’ll need your input.
Where would you like to see Ballotpedia’s information next?
Warm regards,
Leslie Graves
Q&A with CEO Leslie Graves
