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Please select your State from this dropdown list to get your custom ballot, your elected officials, or other electoral information for that State.
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At Vote-USA.org, we feel that American representative democracy works best when citizens vote on an informed basis, and candidates can express their views and positions on issues to the voters, effectively and without cost. We also believe that every voter should be able to obtain the sample ballot they will see at the polls before they go to the polls. Furthermore, the sample ballot should provide a means to easily compare their candidate choices and consider any ballot measures. To accomplish these objectives, Vote-USA.org created this website. We like to think it best connects voters with candidates.
For the 2006 General Elections there were slightly over 13,000 candidates competing for 7,724 U.S. Senate, U.S. House, State Senates, State Houses, and other State-wide offices. These data, as well as numerous ballot measures, that we presented on the 2006 election sample ballots, were proved by the fifty State and DC election authorities. Also each of the over 13,000 candidates were mailed letters inviting them to securely submit (i.e. password protected): (a) biographical information, (b) a picture, and (c) express their position and views on over 60 current issues and over 450 specific topics within these issues. Candidates provided over 30,000 answers to these specific topics. However, that still only represented a fraction of the 13,000 invited candidates.
About a week prior to the 2006 elections this site began to appear on search engine listings. In two days we had requests for about 285,000 sample ballots. On the third day, a press release about this site was published on Yahoo. This caused ballot request to exceed tens of thousands per second and far exceeded our servers' capacity. From that time until after election day our servers were down, due this overwhelming demand. In other words, we fell victim to our own success. We obviously intend to correct this capacity issue in future elections.
Also in the future, we believe candidates will participate in far greater numbers once they realize that voter decisions will be influenced by this site. Furthermore, we believe that this shows that there is an almost inexhaustible thirst by citizens to obtain non-partisan information about their ballot decisions.
Our goal is to eventually include every public election including, primary elections, special elections, as well as, county, town and local elections.
But this site is not about just providing non-partisan election information. It is about providing the information in the most user friendly and usable way. For example, clicking on a candidate’s name on the ballot makes available all the biographical information and the picture that the candidate submitted. Clicking on an office on the ballot provides side-by-side comparisons of the candidate answers to the hundreds of issues and issues topics. But the side-by-side comparisons are provided only where there are answers to present. This type of underlying site architecture and navigation allows us to achieve our objectives.
Vote-USA.org is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization funded exclusively through contributions from private citizens. All contributions are 100% tax-deductible. We would be grateful for your support in helping us to make American government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Vote-USA.org has no political agenda. |
| We feel that American representative democracy works best when citizens communicate with their elected representatives and are able to vote on an informed basis for the candidates that best represent their views and positions on issues of concern. Vote-USA.org is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization funded by contributions from private citizens. All contributions are 100% tax-deductible. |