About OpenBallot
OpenBallot makes it easy for people to find, create, and share voter guides. Every election, newspapers, advocacy groups, policy clubs and highly informed individuals publish thoughtful recommendations—but they're scattered, hard to find, and often duplicative. Ballots keep getting longer and more complex, leaving voters to guess on propositions or skip races entirely. OpenBallot solves this by putting all those guides into a single, transparent platform so voters can see trusted recommendations side by side, cast confident votes quickly, and focus their attention where it matters most.
- For voters, OpenBallot feels like the internet finally showed up to help. You follow the guides you trust and get a clear, summarized view of their recommendations on every item of the ballot. You can dive deeper into conflicting views or finish in minutes with a confident, values‑aligned vote. You can even choose to share your own picks privately or publicly, letting friends and followers benefit from your research.
- On the other side, guide creators get a modern publishing and analytics engine. Advocacy groups, news organizations, NGOs, and political clubs can endorse individual items, build full guides, track how many voters follow them, and understand where their influence lies. These relationships are sticky (guides persist across elections) and measurable (voters can opt in to share which guides they followed and which items they agreed with). By reducing duplicated research and giving groups measurable reach, OpenBallot turns fragmented voter guides into a durable channel for influence.
- At scale, this creates a powerful civic marketplace. Voters get clarity and speed; organizations get a sticky, quantifiable relationship with their audience; and candidates have an incentive to encourage their supporters to log their intentions, creating high‑quality real‑time metrics that can be embedded in news stories the way tweets are today. This positive feedback loop lifts turnout, strengthens accountability and drives viral growth.
This is not just a tool. It's infrastructure for an informed electorate. And it's working. We've already proven the model with three pilots—in the 2024 San Francisco general election, the 2025 San Francisco recall election and the 2025 New York City mayoral race—and now we're raising to expand statewide and nationally. OpenBallot shifts civic engagement from a top‑down party system to a transparent, user‑friendly infrastructure that works for every kind of voter. It is simple, secure and designed for trust—exactly the kind of tool democracy has been waiting for.
Deck
The fine print
Features
- Simplified Voting: Intuitive interface, rapid guide-following, built-in ballot tools.
- Guide Analytics: Stats on follows, influence, and voter alignment.
- Content Sharing: Auto-generated social snippets for guide promotion.
- Secure by Design: End-to-end encryption and modern security protocols.
- Real-Time Metrics: Aggregated voter intent shared publicly or privately.
- Efficiency for Creators: Extremely simple guide creation and publishing.
Strategy
This product design generates a powerful feedback loop: better guides lead to more voters engaged, which incentivizes higher-quality guide creation. Voters become more confident. Organizations gain influence. Civic data becomes richer. And election coverage gets grounded in real public behavior, not pundit speculation.
OpenBallot tomorrow
OpenBallot is what comes next after the collapse of party-driven voter communication. Both major parties are losing trust and relevance. Voters want credible alternatives. OpenBallot can become the default way that activists, NGOs, and trusted local voices reach voters -- not just during elections, but year-round. As the network grows, we unlock ongoing civic engagement, robust real-time metrics, and a recurring data revenue stream from orgs, media, and campaigns -- while preserving user trust and platform integrity.
Funding
OpenBallot is a non-partisan tool to support democracy, and is entirely funded by donations.
It's incubated by Plurality Institute, a 501.c3 non-profit that supports research in scaling human cooperation. We can accept tax-deductible donations, and would love your support.