Mission
Why do we do what we do?
When we get our ballots, two problems come up:
- We don’t know if our votes actually matter.
- We don’t know who most of these candidates are.
Do our votes matter?
For big offices such as the president, our vote is 1 in 150 million. But in smaller local races, our votes have a lot more power because a few hundred votes may decide the outcome. Ironically, these local offices could affect our daily lives far more.
Who are these candidates?
The bigger the office, for example the president, the more media coverage it gets. However, we get almost no substantial information for smaller offices, where our votes matter the most.
The little information we do get about candidates is usually heavily biased with an agenda behind it, if not outright marketing or propaganda.
What Elections Simplified does
The purpose of Elections Simplified is to give real candidates’ track records based on their actions and voting records, so we can see clearly who these candidates are, and make our decisions based on what matters to us, not on the politicians’ ad campaigns.
Why must we stay neutral?
Because we believe that no single person or small group knows best what everyone else should think and do.
Only people themselves can decide what’s best for them after seeing the facts.
The best thing we can do is to uncover the facts so we all can decide for ourselves.
How we do it
We use American AI models to do 2 things: 1. research the web for verifiable public records, and 2. summarize them plainly.
Next, we filter and validate everything through multiple guardrails and run quality passes with both humans and AI to ensure the integrity of the sources. Our source code is open and public here.
The full method — where each kind of data comes from, how records are checked, and how the vote-power and competitiveness ratings are calculated — is on the How it works page.
Our team
We are a few friends who came together from all walks of life and with very different political views. We all thought that the voting system itself could be much more transparent, regardless of someone’s political view.
How you can help
To keep this operation high quality and keep up with the newest elections, it takes tremendous effort from our team and costs a considerable amount of AI tokens.
To help keep us literally alive, you can help in three ways.
- Become an honorary member:
For a small monthly contribution, less than a cup of coffee, you can become an honorary member and help us keep bringing you higher-quality content. And as an honorary member, you may receive occasional member-only analysis reports on the important issues that we think could affect you.
- Share Elections Simplified with friends
We have a very small marketing budget so it would help us a lot if you share our website.
- Subscribe to our emails
Free. We will keep you updated on the elections and issues most important to you. Our emails are very occasional, and we will never spam.
We understand that life is hard. And life has been hard. So we don’t expect contributions from anyone. We will keep this site running for as long as we can afford to with our own money. But if you believe as we believe, join us to make the most transparent, honest voting for all of us.
Payments support operating the service, not any candidate, campaign, committee, party, or charity.
How to use our civic tool on your website
We offer our civic tool at no cost to all organizations and developers that contribute to fair elections and help people get informed. You can use our tool with the instructions here.
Contact
Questions or problems with the site or the app? Email contact@electionssimplified.com.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
How is Elections Simplified funded?
We have no company sponsors. We offer an option for contributions on the website, but so far our “funding” consists of our own Visa and MasterCard.
What happens to the address or ZIP code information we enter? Are they sold or shared?
We don’t save your address to your account, only the districts it maps to. The address goes to a geocoding service and a short-lived cache, as our Privacy Policy explains. We never sell your information, and we never share it with advertisers, campaigns, or data brokers. In addition, we open our source code to public so people will have full transparency of exactly what we do.
How do you check the AI-assisted summaries for accuracy, and how are corrections handled?
We use a combination of methods to ensure the accuracy of the records. To give you 3 examples:
- We have non-AI systems that filter the sources—is the source governmental, a reputable news outlet, or from the candidate’s own campaign website or a suspicious site?
- We give AI models very specific parameters and have different AI models crosscheck each other’s work, which minimizes mistakes from any particular AI model.
- We have humans—ourselves—check the answers for quality. We can’t check every single thing but we check as much as we can. If we find a mistake in one area, we then use AI to find similar mistakes across all records.
We actually have more guardrails in place to ensure the quality and accuracy of records but I don’t want to bore you with too many technical details. So far the quality and accuracy have been exceptionally strong because we would rather filter out something we are not sure about than include it. In our own spot checks, errors have been rare. We know it is not perfect, but it is still far more accurate than political ad campaigns on TV.
Why is Elections Simplified not a non-profit?
We are a small for-profit corporation, not a registered charity, so contributions are not tax-deductible. We chose not to form a non-profit yet because it requires a board and much more paperwork for a tiny team.
We get contributions from users who choose to support us. We never run ads on the site or charge a fee. Our goal is to make voting transparent because we believe there is currently an extreme lack of transparency.