The Voter Guider: A Tool for Making Up Your Mind
Elections are stressful. Not just because of the big races — but because there are a lot of them. Judges, measures, water board, school board. By the time you've researched the top of the ticket you're exhausted, and then there are twelve more decisions to make.
My usual approach: search each thing individually, make a decision, and promptly forget how I got there. If someone asks what I think about Measure J, I'm starting over from scratch. And if I want to share my choices with someone before they vote — my mom, a friend — there's no clean way to do it.
The experiment
I built The Voter Guider to test a simple idea: give people a place to work through their ballot, save their thinking, and share it.
You pick your jurisdiction on a map, go through the races, mark your choices, and add notes as you go. Your guide auto-saves. When you're done, you get a shareable link — the recipient doesn't need an account, they just see your guide.
That's it. The tool doesn't tell you how to vote. It just gives you somewhere to think it through.
What I don't know yet
This is genuinely experimental. Here's what I'm trying to figure out:
Is the sharing feature actually useful? The no-account-required sharing is the thing I'm most curious about. Do people actually send their guides to family or friends before an election? Or is a voter guide fundamentally a personal document — more like a notes app than something social?
Does the map-based jurisdiction picker work? It felt intuitive to build, but that's a bad signal. I want to know if people get stuck on it or if it's just obvious.
Depth vs. breadth. The tool is built to handle multiple jurisdictions and election cycles. But maybe the right move is to go deep on one place — add candidate bios, endorsements, local context — rather than stay generic. I genuinely don't know.
Is this solving a real problem? It's possible I'm the only person who loses track of their ballot research. Possible, but I doubt it.
The ask
If you've got an election coming up — local, state, doesn't matter — try it. Use it to actually work through your ballot. Then tell me what happened.
Specific things I want to know:
- Did you use the notes field, or did you just click your choices and move on?
- Did you share your guide with anyone? If so, who — and did they find it useful?
- What race or decision was hardest to track? Did this help?
Reply to this post, email me, whatever works. I'll read everything and it will directly shape what happens next with this project.
What's next depends entirely on what I hear back. Could mean going deeper on a specific jurisdiction, adding candidate information, or keeping it minimal and seeing if that's enough. Not decided yet — that's the point of asking.