Improving Access to Election Legislation

Problem

The American political landscape is fiendishly complex and diverse. There are fifty state legislatures, 7,000 legislators, 585,000 elected officials in total, and hundreds of thousands of pieces of legislation. This all means that it's challenging for people to find just the information they need.

Geoff Pallay is very familiar with this problem. He's worked at Ballotpedia since 2010, trying to fill information gaps about elections for different types of users. These are, broadly, people who may visit the site once to arm themselves with information to inform their vote and 'political consumers', who work and live in politics, and need more detailed content. Ballotpedia exists to provide neutral, unbiased content that is accurate, trustworthy and authoritative and will make it easier for everyone to participate and to engage in the American political process.

"We have pages on all legislators and over 500,000 articles on  politics, policy, and elections, all professionally curated and maintained by our team, and we're constantly growing," says Geoff. "We wanted to add information on legislation, and realized how difficult it would be to ensure the information is comprehensive, stays up to date, and is presented so it’s easy to understand for voters, policy professionals, and journalists."

Solution

Ballotpedia turned to BillTrack50 for help. The first step was adding sharing widgets to every state legislator's page to show the bills that the legislator has sponsored. As Geoff explains, "It's great, always up-to-date information, and it’s helpful for our readers – whether they’re power users, or a citizen getting ready to vote."

Ballotpedia also added widgets to articles on particular topics to highlight key legislation. "For example, we have articles on school choice in all 50 states, so if you want to know about school choice in, say, Alabama, then you can see the legislation that has been introduced or enacted at a glance." Geoff goes on to say.

Ballotpedia began tracking election legislation more directly in 2022. For this ambitious project they needed more than the standard tools so they turned to the BillTrack50 API. "Working with the API was very straightforward, and it allowed us to design a custom interface, custom tags and our own bill summaries. All built on BillTrack50 data," explains Geoff. Using the tracker, people can easily see and understand legislation in their state which affects how they vote. The bill summaries, written by Ballotpedia staff, mean they don't have to read complicated and lengthy bill text.

"It was a huge project and BillTrack50 has been fantastic in supporting us every step of the way. They’ve always gone the extra mile to make sure we can realize our vision for the project, and for our readers." says Geoff.

Karen Suhaka, founder of BillTrack50, is particularly impressed by the product that Ballotpedia has created. "Our mission is to make democracy more democratic by helping everyone participate in the legislative process, so   Ballotpedia’s Election Administration Legislation Tracker is a perfect use of our data, as it allows voters to easily understand how the legislators they elect can impact the election process itself."

Results

Ballotpedia’s Election Administration Legislation Tracker has proven hugely popular. There have been over a million page views since the tracker launched and, according to Geoff, Ballotpedia has hear from countless journalists, donors, and activists who use the tracker and really love it.

It was so successful Ballotpedia is now expanding the approach into other legislative areas. "We've only scratched the surface with things we can do, building on BillTrack50," says Geoff. "There's a million other bill topics we can do like that, where we're looking at all the raw data that's been collected, and then seeing how you can package or rearrange that to do more."

Ballotpedia is also very excited about BillTrack50's new AI tools, particularly the AI-generated bill summaries. Geoff is keen to use them to save time and effort in the future, to allow them to analyze a greater number of bills.

Karen is equally delighted. As she explains, "Ballotpedia’s Election Administration Legislation Tracker has been so popular, at one point it almost crashed our website! That's the kind of problem we like to have, as it means we're really having an impact."