Most of us vote for people we know almost nothing about. We recognize a name at the top of the ballot, guess at the rest, and hope for the best. That is not a character flaw, it is what happens when the information is scattered, people are busy and you don’t really know where to start.

This guide shows you where to look.

Start with a premise that saves a great deal of frustration: no candidate will align with you completely. Waiting for a perfect match is a recipe for staying home. The question worth asking is not does this person agree with me on everything? It is does this person have the judgment, character, and competence to serve well — and are they pointed in the right direction on what matters most to me?

Then look down. The races furthest down the ballot are often the ones that reach you first — a school board member, a county treasurer, or a state representative shapes your daily life more directly than most officials in Washington. And almost no one shows up for them. In 2024, roughly 64% of eligible Americans voted for president. Typical turnout in a mayoral election is about 20%. In school board races, it is frequently 5 to 10%.

However, these numbers describe an opportunity, not a crisis. The decisions closest to your family are being made by the smallest, least representative group of voters. These races receive almost no press coverage, which is exactly why the research burden falls to you, and is also why your work here counts for so much. A well-informed vote is never worth more than in the election very few are watching.

Researching and analyzing candidates is often not a quick process. You will need to invest some time and energy to collect the information you need to make an informed decision. This guide provides structure and resources to make the investigation easier and help you make decisions. The following sections will do just that by taking you through a series of thoughtful steps.

Establish Criteria

Before researching, consider what you want from a candidate. We recommend writing down your priorities.

The first step is to decide what basis you will use to evaluate a candidate. Policy priorities and voting are personal decisions that affect what criteria each person chooses. As a result, each person will have different priorities and criteria.

Three categories will consistently help you discern how to vote: fit for the role, character, and policy positions.

Fit for the Role

Start with the job description, not the personality. Different offices demand genuinely different skill sets, and a candidate who would be excellent in one seat may be poorly suited to another.

• What does this office actually do? Many voters cast ballots for coroner, county clerk, drain commissioner, or comptroller without knowing the scope of the position. Look up the statutory duties before you evaluate anyone.
• Does the candidate have the technical qualifications the role requires? A treasurer or auditor manages public money — ask whether the candidate has a background in accounting, finance, or audit. A judge should have relevant legal experience. A school board member should understand budgets and curriculum. Charisma does not reconcile a ledger.
• Is there a track record of accomplishment? Look for things finished, not things announced. What did the candidate actually build, pass, reform, or fix — in government, business, the military, a nonprofit, or a family enterprise? Ask what they would point to as their greatest professional accomplishment, and then verify it independently.
• Can they work with others? Almost no office is unilateral. Does their history show an ability to build coalitions, negotiate, and get to a result with people who disagree with them?

Character and Disposition

Policy positions are a snapshot; disposition is a predictor. Circumstances change, unforeseen crises and votes arise that no campaign anticipated. What you are really electing is a person’s judgment under conditions neither of you can foresee. These questions help you assess it:

• Will this candidate defend fiscal responsibility and work to make government efficient and accountable to the people it serves? Look for specifics: Have they ever voted against a budget their own side supported? Can they name a program they would cut, not just programs they would fund?
• Will this candidate foster a spirit of creativity and entrepreneurship in the legislation they advance? Do they treat small business, innovation, and risk-taking as things to be enabled, or as things to be managed? Ask what regulation they support and would remove.
• Do they understand the moment we are in — and if not, can they learn? Few candidates will have mastered every issue on the horizon, from artificial intelligence to demographic shifts to fiscal pressure on entitlements. Curiosity is more valuable than a memorized answer. Watch for a candidate who can say “I don’t know, but here’s how I’d find out.”
• Do they listen? In a town hall or a coffee meeting, notice the ratio of talking to listening. Notice whether they answer the question you asked or the question they wished you had asked. Notice whether they can accurately restate the position of someone who disagrees with them.
• Will this person uphold the rule of law? Will they respect the limits of the office, the outcome of elections, the independence of courts, and the constraints of the constitution — including when those constraints cut against their own interests or their own party’s? A commitment to process that survives inconvenience is the only kind that counts.
• Do they believe in people’s ability to rise? Does the candidate speak about citizens as capable adults who, given opportunity and a fair framework, will build good lives — or as populations to be administered? Listen to the verbs they use about the people they want to serve.
• Do they tell the truth when it costs them something? Look for a moment when the candidate publicly took a position that was unpopular with the people they most needed. If no such moment exists, that is itself information.

Policy Positions

Policies are government directives that shape behavior in individuals, families, businesses, and non-profits. Consider the candidate’s stances on specific issues. Is the candidate talking about issues that matter to you and your family? Is the candidate talking about solutions that open up possibilities and unleash creativity, or is the candidate proposing solutions that are static, implemented, and led by government entities?

One useful lens for evaluating any candidate’s proposals, whatever the issue, is to ask where a policy places power, and who ultimately bears its costs. Every well-intended policy carries the potential for unintended consequences, and a thoughtful candidate anticipates them. As you weigh a candidate’s positions, you might ask:

• Does this policy open the field or entrench the powerful? Rules meant to protect the public can end up written by the industries they regulate, and compliance costs that a large corporation absorbs easily can become a wall that keeps out new competitors and entrepreneurs.
• Who benefits, and who pays, who loses? Programs often create a small group of intense beneficiaries while spreading the cost across taxpayers which is why temporary programs rarely end.
• Is the cost being passed to the future? Spending financed by debt shifts the bill to citizens who cannot yet vote, weakening the link between those who authorize spending and those who pay for it.
• Is this decision being made close to the people it affects? The further a decision sits from the community it touches, the harder it is to see who made it, to hold them accountable, or to correct it when it misfires.
• Does it strengthen or crowd out what already works? Ask whether a public program builds on the families, congregations, and civic institutions already doing the work — or displaces them.

These questions cut in more than one direction, and reasonable people weigh them differently. A candidate who wants to expand a program should be able to say who will pay and how it will be held accountable; a candidate who wants to cut one should be able to say who currently depends on it and what fills the gap. What you are listening for is not a particular answer, but whether the candidate has thought about the trade-off at all.

Prepare to track and compare candidate stances to help you decide.

Identify Your Options

Once you have a framework, you need to identify the candidates on your ballot.

These resources will use your address to pull up a list of federal, state, and local elections happening in your area and the candidates who are running:

• Ballotpedia Sample Ballot Lookup — Look up your local ballot and upcoming votes; includes candidate biographies, past election results, and responses to Ballotpedia’s candidate survey.
• BallotReady — Look up ballot guides, election locations, and more.
• U.S. Vote Foundation — Look up your registration and election information. Especially useful for overseas and military voters.

Do not skip the bottom of the ballot. Pull up a sample ballot early and count how many races you cannot immediately identify. That number is your research to-do list.

Research

Once you have identified who is running in your area, you can research their party affiliation, policy stances, skills, and experience. Use your list of priorities from the previous step to track candidate stances to help decide.

Key facts to research about a candidate include voting records, previous government service, and endorsements they have received. Do a news search to see what has been written about the candidate across a range of outlets — not only the ones you usually read. Check where the candidate stands relative to their party: do they align with the platform, or do they differ? Identify where they diverge and ask what their thinking is on that issue. A candidate who has never once broken with their party is telling you something about how they will behave when it is hard.

Reading a Candidate’s Website

A campaign website is the one place a candidate controls entirely. What they choose to put there — and leave out — is revealing.

• Is there a real issues page, or only slogans? “I support strong schools” is not a position. “I will vote against any budget that raises the levy above X” is. Vagueness is a choice.
• Is there a biography with verifiable specifics? Dates, employers, degrees, offices held. If a claimed credential is described only in general terms, look it up.
• Does the site say what the candidate would do, or only what they are against? A platform built entirely on opposition tells you little about how someone governs.
• Who is listed as endorsing, and who is on the finance committee? This is often more informative than the issues page.
• Is there a way to contact a human being? A campaign that is hard to reach before the election will not become easier to reach after it.
• Check the “About” page against the record. For incumbents, compare stated priorities against actual votes. Divergence is not automatically disqualifying — circumstances change — but it should prompt a question.

Evaluating a Candidate’s Social Media Presence

Social media shows you a candidate unedited, and often unguarded. Read it as evidence of temperament rather than as a highlight reel. A useful discipline: scroll back at least a year before the campaign launched, when the candidate was not performing for voters.

• Tone under pressure. How does the candidate respond to criticism, to a bad news cycle, to someone who disagrees? Do they engage, ignore, or attack? This is the closest you will get to watching them react to a crisis before you elect them.
• Substance-to-outrage ratio. Count the posts that explain a policy versus the posts that denounce an opponent. Both have a place in a campaign, but the ratio is a fair proxy for what the candidate finds interesting.
• Local versus national focus. Is a candidate for county commission posting about county roads and county budgets, or about national controversies over which the office has no authority? A local candidate who talks only about Washington may be running for the wrong reason.
• Consistency across audiences. Compare the candidate’s posture across platforms and rooms. Does the message shift depending on who is watching?
• Evidence of listening. Do they ever amplify a constituent, credit someone else’s idea, acknowledge an error, or change their mind in public? A candidate who has never publicly updated a view has either never been wrong or never admitted it.
• Who they engage with, and who engages with them. Endorsements are formal; interactions are informal. Both matter.
• A caution. Verify accounts are official — impersonation and parody accounts are common. Distinguish between what a candidate said and what a supporter said. And remember that an old post is evidence of who someone was, which is not always who they are; look for whether they have accounted for it.

Voting Records and Legislative Tracking

For an incumbent at any level, the voting record is the most honest document in the campaign. What someone has done under real pressure, with real consequences, beats anything on a mailer.

• Congress.gov — The official source for federal legislation, sponsorships, and roll call votes.
• GovTrack — Free federal bill and vote tracking with email alerts, plain-English summaries, and statistical context on how often a member breaks with their party.
• LegiScan — Tracks legislation across Congress and all fifty state legislatures. Free “OneVote” accounts let you monitor bills in your home state.

For federal elections, see the Federal Election Commission’s list of resources and research points.

A note on interest-group scorecards. Nearly every issue has a national organization that follows it and produces a guide. These are useful for translating tangled legalese into plain language, but every scorecard reflects the priorities of the group that wrote it, including which votes it chose to count. Read two from organizations that disagree with each other, and you will learn more than reading five that agree. You can find issue guides and your current representatives through USA.gov.

Here’s an example of a legislative scorecard from Future 42, a group in Clark County Oregon.

Campaign Finance

Campaign finances and endorsements can be a strong indicator of a candidate’s position on issues, and of whom they will feel accountable to in office. All federal candidates are required to report donations to the Federal Election Commission. You can look up candidates and their finances for the current cycle.

For state and local candidates, campaign finance is filed with your state’s election board or secretary of state, not the FEC. Also useful:

• OpenSecrets — Follows federal money, including outside spending that does not appear in a candidate’s own filings.

Ask not only who gave, but who gave early and how much of the money came from inside the district. A campaign funded overwhelmingly from out of state is answerable to people who cannot vote for it.

See The Policy Circle’s Campaign Finance Deep Dive for more resources and guidance on the intricacies of this topic.

Connect and Follow Up

Once you have some background on a candidate, you may want to ask questions to better understand who they are and what they stand for. Local candidates are remarkably accessible — most will meet a constituent for coffee, and many will answer an email personally.

Foundational questions:

• Why are you running?
• What should the role of the specific office you are seeking be?
• What is your view on _____, and _____? (Don’t be afraid to ask about the most pressing issues in your state, such as debt, pensions, or infrastructure.)
• How will you work with your colleagues in the office?

Questions that reveal character and capacity:

• What is the hardest decision you have ever had to make, and what did it cost you?
• Tell me about a time you changed your mind on something significant. What changed it?
• Name a program or expenditure you would eliminate, and tell me who would be unhappy about it.
• What specifically qualifies you for this office?
• What is an issue facing us in the next five years that you do not yet fully understand — and how are you learning about it?
• If a court ruled against a policy you campaigned on, what would you do?
• What would make you break with your own party?
• A year from now, how will I be able to tell whether you kept this promise?

Pay as much attention to how the candidate answers as to what they say. Do they engage the question or pivot to talking points? Are they willing to be specific when specificity is costly?

Consider and Weigh Options

Now that you have gathered information on your elections and candidates, it is time to analyze it. Note your first impressions, then return to the criteria you set at the start and ask which candidate best reflects your priorities.

Expect trade-offs. You will rarely find a candidate who is strong on every dimension. One may be superbly qualified for the office but weak on an issue you care about; another may share your convictions entirely yet have no record of finishing anything. Weighing those tensions honestly, rather than pretending them away, is the substance of civic judgment.

Two things make that weighing more reliable. The first is evidence. For each judgment you reach, ask what it rests on. If you cannot point to a specific vote, a direct quote, or a verifiable accomplishment, you are scoring an impression rather than a record, and impressions are exactly what campaigns are designed to manufacture. Going back through your criteria one at a time and attaching a concrete source to each keeps you honest.

The second is party. A candidate’s positions matter, but so does how much room they will actually have to act on them. Much of the time, an officeholder votes with their party, and on many issues that party line is the single best predictor of how a candidate will govern, whatever their campaign emphasized. So look at the party’s platform as well as the person, and then look at the exceptions. Has this candidate ever broken with their party, publicly disagreed with its leadership, or worked across the aisle to get something done? A record of independence tells you they will represent the district when it counts; a record of perfect party loyalty tells you the platform will usually win. Neither is automatically better. A candidate whose party you trust and who reliably advances its agenda may be exactly what you want. What you are trying to figure out is which of the two you are getting.

Engage with Your Community

Community is a strong asset — be sure to use it when making your final decisions. By conversing with people around you, you can encourage them to participate in the political process and receive valuable feedback.

Consider organizing a coffee with a few friends to discuss important races. Also see our tips for having impossible conversations and how we suggest structuring your policy discussions.

Vote in the Primaries & in the General Election 

Do not wait for November. In many congressional and state races, the primary is where the real decision gets made. Primaries, the elections that determine each party’s nominee, draw far fewer voters than general elections, so each vote carries proportionally more weight. And in a district or state that leans heavily toward one party, the primary often decides the seat outright: by the general election, the meaningful choice has already been made, sometimes without you.

This matters most in exactly the down-ballot races this guide has emphasized. A U.S. House seat, a state senate district, or a county office is frequently uncompetitive in November but genuinely contested in the primary. Skip the primary and you may be sitting out the only election in that race that was ever in doubt.

Know your state’s rules. Primary systems vary widely, and the rules differ from state to state and sometimes by office:

• In a closed primary, only voters registered with a party may vote in that party’s primary.
• In an open primary, any voter may participate, regardless of affiliation.
• Semi-closed systems fall in between, typically letting unaffiliated voters choose a party’s ballot while keeping registered members to their own.
• A few states, including California, Washington, and Alaska, use a top-two or top-four system, where every candidate for an office appears on a single ballot and the top finishers advance regardless of party.

The practical warning: in a closed-primary state, there is usually a deadline to register or declare a party affiliation well before primary day. Miss it and you can be shut out of the primary entirely. Check your state’s rules and deadlines early. Your secretary of state’s website or VOTE411 will have the specifics for your address.

A note on ranked-choice voting. A growing number of states and cities now use ranked-choice voting (RCV), also called instant-runoff voting, in primaries or general elections. Instead of choosing a single candidate, you rank them in order of preference: first choice, second choice, and so on. If no candidate wins an outright majority of first choices, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their supporters’ ballots shift to those voters’ next choice. The process repeats until one candidate has a majority. The practical upshot for you: ranking a sincere first choice who may not win does not “waste” your vote, because your ballot then counts toward your next preference. If your jurisdiction uses RCV, rank as many candidates as you genuinely have preferences among, though you are never required to rank them all. For a short animated walkthrough of how the count works, see the Maine Secretary of State’s ranked-choice voting explainer.

Once you have decided, take note of your choices. Sample ballots are valuable tools for recording your decisions, and both Ballotpedia and VOTE411 let you print a marked sample ballot to carry in. Bring hard copies of anything you need to remember, since some jurisdictions restrict phone use inside the polling place.

Vote the whole ballot. Leaving a competitive race blank hands the decision to the small number of voters who did their homework on it, which, having read this far, is now you. There is one sensible exception: when a race has a single candidate running unopposed and you do not support that person, leaving it blank is a legitimate choice. An undervote in an uncontested race is a quiet way to withhold your endorsement, and in some places a write-in or a blank is the only signal available to you. The distinction worth keeping is between a race you skipped because you did not do the work and a race you left blank on purpose.

First, be sure to vote. The Policy Circle’s First-Time Voter Handbook explains the process and what to expect. After voting, review The Policy Circle’s Active Voter Guide for more ways to be involved.

Aside from being an active voter, here are other ways to engage in the electoral process:

• Become a poll watcher or election judge to help ensure that election rules are followed. This is part of The Policy Circle’s Civic Leadership Program (CLER) curriculum.
• Attend the meetings. School board, city council, county commission, and zoning board meetings are open, sparsely attended, and where most decisions that affect your daily life are actually made. Attending a few (or viewing them online) will teach you more about your local officials than any voter guide.
• Engage with candidates in a larger setting: invite a candidate to a community gathering (one at a time), invite a candidate to your place of business, attend a meet-and-greet.
• Join a campaign team. Beyond contributing, you can knock on doors, make calls, or explain your candidate’s platform to friends. Good candidates need strong teams.
• Make your voice heard. Write your local paper an op-ed or a letter to the editor. See The Policy Circle’s Guide to Writing an Op-Ed.
• Keep watching after the election. Set up a free bill-tracking alert (GovTrack for federal, or LegiScan for your state legislature) for the officials you elected. Accountability that begins on Election Day ends there.
• Once your candidate is elected, step up to help them serve and look into opportunities to join their team.
• Consider running yourself. A striking share of local offices go uncontested each cycle. Ballotpedia tracks uncontested races, and the number is larger than most voters assume.

Look up your ballot and your candidates

• Ballotpedia Sample Ballot Lookup
• Vote Smart — Nonpartisan officeholder and candidate profiles
• BallotReady
• Vote.org
• U.S. Vote Foundation

Track votes and legislation — federal, state, and local

• Congress.gov — Official federal source
• GovTrack — Free federal tracking, alerts, and party-loyalty statistics
• Open States — Free state legislator and bill tracking, all fifty states
• LegiScan — Congress plus all fifty state legislatures; free OneVote monitoring
• BillTrack50 — Free tier for citizens
• Many states run their own official app — for example, GoVoteTN in Tennessee. Check your secretary of state’s website. Some states permit their official app inside the polling place when phones are otherwise restricted.

Follow the money

• Federal Election Commission
• OpenSecrets — Federal contributions and outside spending
• Your state’s Board of Elections

Analysis, polling, and election context

• Ballotpedia’s Election Analysis Hub, 2026
• RealClearPolitics — Opinion, news, analysis, and polling averages
• Silver Bulletin — Nate Silver’s polling averages and election modeling
• Strength In Numbers — G. Elliott Morris’s data journalism and polling analysis
• This Map Shows How America Voted in Every Election Since 1824 — TIME

Related Policy Circle Briefs

• Campaign Finance Deep Dive
• First-Time Voter Handbook
• The Active Voter Guide
• Election Processes and Innovation