Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates

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Each election year, I’ve shared how I plan to vote in local elections. This year I want to scale up and produce voter guides for all the big US cities/states with a critical mass of ACX readers.

Here are the ten locales I’m most interested in:

• San Francisco

• Berkeley

• San Jose

• Los Angeles

• Seattle

• NYC

• Boston/Cambridge

• Austin

• Chicago

• Philadelphia

The process will look like:

1. Each city’s organizer sets a date for the “ballot meetup”, when everyone gets together, researches the issues, and agrees on recommendations. The meetups should be sometime between October 5 and October 20 (sorry for short notice!). They use this form to tell me when that will be.

2. On October 4, I post a list of all the ballot meetup dates.

3. You hold your ballot meetups and get me your recommendations by October 21. You can use Google Docs or OpenBallot.

4. I post all of them on October 22 so you have a couple of days to read them before voting.

What should our recommendations look like?

I’d like a paragraph or two of reasoning (can be longer if there’s a really complicated issue) plus a recommendation (the recommendation can be “we’re not sure”). See my 2022 post for examples.

So wait, is this for Democrats, Republicans, or what?

I’m going to rely on this being ACX meetup groups, which I assume will average out to the standard ACX political position, something like “centrist with progressive and libertarian sympathies”. If your meetup group doesn’t average out to that, vote your conscience anyway. I think most people will be more interested in hearing what you were able to learn about each candidate, and what considerations moved you, than in blindly trusting your final result.

What if our group can’t agree?

You can either vote among your group, or present both sides’ reasoning and recommend that people vote their conscience.

What should we send recommendations on?

I assume everyone already knows who they’re picking for president. I’m more interested in downballot races like mayor, county supervisor, or state legislator. In states like California where people vote directly on propositions and constitutional amendments, I’m interested in those too. You don’t have to do every single dogcatcher or whatever. Think of the effective altruist motto - “important, tractable, neglected” - and pick whatever set of local races seem highest value.

If your meetup group covers many localities (like a city with many city council districts, or somewhere like Berkeley or Boston where many of the attendees will really be from Oakland or Cambridge), you can decide whether to do full ballots for all localities, the most important races from each, or just pick one and stick to it.

How do we determine who to vote for?

Most cities will give out ballot guides before the election. Local institutions like newspapers will often make recommendations; you may choose to trust them or not based on whether you agree with their editorial perspective. You can usually Google all candidates’ names and find their campaign websites and sometimes local news interviews with them. Local interest groups (YIMBYs, teachers unions, etc) will often endorse one or another candidate, and you can Google those interest groups’ websites to see who they support and why.

What if my meetup group wants to do this, but I’m not in one of those ten cities?

If you’re an established ACX meetup group, go for it. I won’t have the time to handhold you like I will the big cities, but I’ll still post your voter guide if you get it to me on time.

I’m not interested in posting voter guides made by individuals (as opposed to meetup groups), because I worry that the lack of averaging across many people makes it a kind of random perspective that it would be weird for ACX to endorse. If you want to make one anyway, you can post it in the comments here or something, and maybe I’ll take pity and highlight it on an Open Thread.

If you’re in a non-US city that also has an election in the last few months of 2024, feel free to tag along, I guess.

How will you handle California statewide offices and initiatives?

I’m soliciting voting guides from four California cities. If they all give recommendations on statewide offices and initiatives, I’ll probably post everyone’s individual guide for their city on the 22nd (which will include their statewide recommendations), then take a few days to read them over and post some kind of consensus California version later.

What if I’m a well-informed representative of some locally popular interest group (effective altruists, YIMBYs, etc) and I want to make sure that people know my group’s perspective?

On the post on the 4th, I’ll include emails for all the meetup organizers. You can email them and let them know your thoughts so they can bring them up at their own meetup. If you have consensus California statewide thoughts, email me.

You can also comment on this post or the upcoming one on the 4th.

Okay, I’m a meetup organizer who wants to participate, what should I do?

Use this form to tell me when your meetup will be, and check the #ballots channel on the organizer Discord for more information.

I’m a meetup organizer but definitely can’t / don’t want to participate, what should I do?

Let’s talk about it on the #ballots channel of the organizer Discord, and maybe we can come up with an alternate leader for that session. If you’re an organizer but not on the Discord, email skyler[at] rationalitymeetups[ dot]org to fix that.