HOW WE GATHER INFORMATION
The underlying information required to generate personalized ballots sometimes including the location of the polling place based on a voter's address was gathered from:
- the Election Officials in each of the fully-participating counties. The state or county Elections Officials also provided the official data about races and ballot measures. (California, Westchester Co., NY, Hamilton Co., OH)
- the Census database of the U. S. Government plus other data available locally (all other locales). Volunteers from the associated Leagues of Women Voters obtain official lists of contests and candidates from appropriate Elections Offices.
All candidates in the fully-participating counties were invited by letter to provide data for their free web pages. All information about candidates was gathered from the candidates themselves either by entering the data on a web form or by filling out a hard copy form and mailing it to us.
A small percentage of counties have a partial implementation of Smart Voter features. In some counties, not all contests are included. In others, the ballot lookup feature and/or polling place locator are not implemented. Sometimes candidates were not invited to supply information for a Smart Voter web page. The choice of level of implementation is made by the League of Women Voters and is usually a function of available people resources.