Prepare yourself for Election Day: everyone's ballot will look a little different, depending on your home town address. In Monteagle, they're voting for alderman, in Luxemburg, Wisconsin, they are choosing their state assembly representative; but if you live in Jackson, MS, you're going to be voting on medical marijuana as well as choosing who'll next serve in the Mississippi Supreme Court, District 1. A simple way to discover the local issues and races you will be voting on is Ballotpedia's Sample Ballot Lookup tool.
In order to find out what's on your ballot, you can look at sample ballots on your state's secretary of state page or on your state or county's election commission page.
For example, I can find a sample ballot for Franklin County by going to the Tennessee Secretary of State page, scrolling down until I see "Elections," clicking on "Find Your County Election Commission," clicking on Franklin County on the map of Tennessee, then clicking on "Sample Ballots" on the Franklin County Election Commission page.
If you follow these steps, you might notice that this ballot includes elections that aren't open to everyone in Franklin County. For example, the Mayor of Monteagle election will only be open to those in Monteagle. There are also two Tennessee House of Representatives Districts on this ballot, 39 and 92. To find out which legislators I can vote for, in Franklin Country, I can visit the Tennessee General Assembly site and enter my address (I got here by Googling "Find my Tennessee state representative.").
Your state may be different from Tennessee, but these are the kinds of pages you'll be looking for to find out more about who is running in the state and local elections on your ballot.
You can also look up your sample ballot on Ballotpedia or Ballotready using your address.
Once you find out which state and local elections are on your ballot and who is running or what is being decided (in the case of propositions or amendments), you're ready to move on to researching what you've found.
While looking at candidate's websites and social media pages may be helpful, it's important to keep in mind that candidates control this information and will likely only share things that put them in a positive light or that they believe voters want to hear. A candidate's page may help you see if their decisions and policies will align with your own beliefs and values, but you need to go beyond what the candidates say about themselves to get the whole picture.
Read about candidates in local newspapers or on local news channel websites. You can search for the candidates name on Google and add "site:" followed by the site where you want to look them up. For example, I can look up a candidate for the Monteagle mayoral election by Googling "tony gilliam site:grundycountyherald.com."
You can also find local news in these newspaper databases from the Jessie Ball duPont library:
Talk to locals. When finding out about local candidates, it can be good to talk to the people who are directly affected by what these candidates are doing or will do. For example, when trying to figure out whether you should vote to keep the current clerk of deeds or elect a new clerk of deeds, talk to people who work with deeds (local lawyers, real estate agents, etc.).
In your research on state and local candidates, you may find that some candidates take a strong stance on an issue and others take a different stance. To do more research on particular issues in your community or state, look at the Researching Issues page on this guide.
You may see some items on your ballot that don't include people's names. They may be long paragraphs of text, and are often written in dense legal language.
For example:
In this measure (on the left), on a 2012 ballot in Alameda County, California, voters were asked whether they wanted to change the Piedmont City Code. This kind of question can be very confusing, especially if voters are unsure of how the "new 10-year Special Municipal Sewer Surtax" might affect them. We see here that the ordinance is "on file with the Piedmont City Clerk," but that is unhelpful when the voter is in the voting booth.
In this public measure on all Iowa ballots in 2020 (on the right), voters are able to vote for a state constitutional convention to revise Iowa's state constitution, which may sound a little weird if voters are unfamiliar with the fact that this question is required to appear on the Iowa ballot every ten years. The Des Moines Register explains this in an article published on October 2, 2020.
As with local candidates, the best place to research state and local ballot measures is often a state or local newspaper or news website.
In the case of propositions and other ballot measures, it can also help to search Google for the name or number of the measure along with the state or city where it's on the ballot (e.g. California proposition 25, Chattanooga Ordinance No. 13192). This is a good way to find explainers from a range of sources from the Secretary of State's office to Ballotpedia to Reddit.
(Remember, if you’re not sure about how credible the information is, use the SIFT method)
Elections for judges are different in every state. In some states judges are elected by popular vote, in other states a popular vote may not elect them, but may choose whether they are retained (whether they stay in their current position). Judges may be on the ballot for the state supreme court, appellate courts, or other courts. Ballotpedia has a section on Judicial Elections in 2020.
You can look up information about judges, like rulings they have made or evaluations from a local Bar Association. Here are some examples of pages that give information on judges in particular states:
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