Often at election time, questions arise like, “who should I vote for?” This problem is particularly keen when it comes to local offices or “sleepy” primaries. It’s cumbersome and difficult to put together voter guides. For voters, it’s often difficult to find and read such voter guides. It would be great if voters could turn to their friends and trusted community leaders/organizations to see essentially their endorsements, and to create a kind of personalized voter guide based on pre-existing trust network. For ex, “I’m going to vote for Jane for Sherriff because my friend Joe thinks she’s great.”
Others have tried riffs on this idea - Dan Ancona had a “social ballot” concept a few weeks ago - but they simply did not have enough investment or were too “frictiony” to gain wide adoption. With sufficient resourcing and UX investment this concept could become a powerful mechanism to raise involvement in local elections.
Currently, Blue Voter Guide is exploring a solution in this space. Their founder interviewed with Great Battlefield in October 2022. Along similar lines, Aviva Rosman discusses an idea to collect endorsements in a database, as a potential extension to the core database maintained by BallotReady, in her Great Battlefield interview, at 24:04.