Ballotpedia is the one profile you don't own but can't skip

The short version: when someone searches your name, a Ballotpedia profile can rank prominently — an authoritative-looking result beyond your own domain, on a page you don't own and can't control. What you can control is whether that page has your words on it: the Candidate Connection survey is free, identity-verified, published in your own words, and treated by Ballotpedia as a record rather than a draft. Ballotpedia estimates the form itself at roughly thirty minutes; budget an afternoon and write it carefully, because what you submit outlasts most of what your campaign will produce this year.

Why a page you don't control is worth an afternoon

Be precise about what this page is, because the value is real but often misdescribed. A Ballotpedia candidate page carries two different kinds of content. There is Ballotpedia's editorial material — the staff-written biography and election coverage, maintained under its own editorial policies — which can genuinely corroborate basic facts from independent sources. And there is Candidate Connection — your survey answers, which are your words: candidate-supplied, identity-verified, published on an independent platform, and not fact-checked by Ballotpedia. Putting the same claim on your website and in your survey does not turn it into independently verified fact, and nobody honest will tell you it does.

What the survey does do is real, and our guide to AI search visibility explains why it matters: it puts a structured, consistently formatted, verified-attribution statement of who you are on a widely used platform you don't own — more discoverable surface area, outside your own domain, in a format built to be indexed and reused. It solves two specific problems well. The first is disambiguation: if you share a name with anyone — another candidate, a retired athlete, a felon three states over — an entry that pins your name to your office, your district, and your year is a strong third-party disambiguation signal. The second is reach beyond the page itself: Ballotpedia offers its election data, candidate and survey-response data included, through data products that media, researchers, and civic-tech applications use — additional paths through which your information can be encountered, though no one should promise you that every partner carries every answer.

First, find out what exists

Search Ballotpedia for your race and your name before assuming anything. Federal and state elections are part of Ballotpedia's core election coverage. At the local level, its full election coverage runs to the 100 largest US cities, mayors and city councils and district attorneys in the state capitals, and school boards in the largest districts — plus a state-by-state local expansion program beyond that. As of late August 2026, Ballotpedia says it plans to cover more than 45,000 local elections across 32 states this cycle — a figure it has already revised upward during the year, so check its live coverage page for the current count rather than trusting anyone's snapshot, including ours.

You'll find one of three situations. A page exists and is thin — a name, an office, maybe a party — which is the normal case and exactly what the survey fixes. A page exists and is wrong — see below. Or no page exists, because your race is outside the current coverage scope — and here Ballotpedia's own FAQ is stronger than you'd guess: every candidate for office can complete the survey, and for a local candidate outside full coverage, Ballotpedia says it will create a basic profile and add the survey responses to it, even though it may not cover your election's results. For the smallest races, that's the difference between existing on the platform and not existing there at all.

How Candidate Connection actually works

The survey is free and open to every candidate. It may be submitted by the candidate or a qualified campaign representative, and before publishing anything Ballotpedia verifies the submitter's identity through the Truepic Vision app — a photo-ID upload whose stated purpose is keeping impersonators and AI-generated fakes off candidate pages. Accepted IDs currently include driver's licenses, passports, military IDs, student IDs, employee IDs, and tribal IDs; Ballotpedia says the ID sits on a secure server for six months after the November general election and is then deleted, and that it will not publish responses without sufficient verification. Whoever submits — candidate or authorized representative — make sure that person is available to complete the verification step.

One thing Ballotpedia does not do: fact-check your answers. Its FAQ says it relies on candidates to be honest, and it does not run background checks or verify the factual claims in your responses — it verifies who submitted them. That's exactly why the pre-submission check below matters: the accuracy of what you publish here is entirely on you.

The survey asks for the three main points you want voters to remember about you and your candidacy, plus a standard set of questions about you and the race, with optional extras: a photo, endorsements, campaign links. Ballotpedia publishes your submitted responses in full, in your own words — subject to its published right to make clearly marked edits — and may use information from the questionnaire elsewhere in your profile. That is the opportunity. Most candidates who bother at all dash it off like a form; our advice is to treat it as your most durable published interview, because it stays on the page for the life of the race and beyond.

Write answers that survive being quoted

Everything we said about your website's bio applies double here, because you can't revise this one freely afterward. Specific claims beat values statements: "I voted against the 2025 rezoning and would again" is quotable; "I believe in smart growth" evaporates. Write your three key messages as three sentences a stranger could repeat accurately at a dinner table.

Two mechanical rules — both our discoverability practice, not Ballotpedia requirements. Use exactly the form of your name that appears on the ballot — the same form as your filings, your website, and your press materials, middle initial included if you use one. Every variation you introduce makes the disambiguation problem harder for everything downstream. And name the office, district, and year in your answers where it's natural to, because quoted fragments travel without their context.

Answer every question you can answer usefully and accurately — not every question is required, and an unanswered one simply stays unanswered; Ballotpedia doesn't fill it in from elsewhere. But every skipped question is one fewer place voters hear directly from you, leaving more of the page's overall picture to Ballotpedia's staff-written material and whatever else is public about you.

Know the edit rules before you submit

This is the part most campaigns learn too late. Ballotpedia's published policy on changing survey answers: typos and grammar get fixed directly, and you can add answers to questions you skipped. But if you want to change the substance of an answer — you've shifted position, you regret a phrasing — the original stays, and Ballotpedia adds a timestamped note from you above it. Ballotpedia also reserves the right to edit responses itself, marking its edits in brackets; if you disagree with such an edit, your remedy is removing the survey entirely.

Two more rules worth knowing. You can retake the survey — but when you do, Ballotpedia keeps both responses on your page, the newer one first, each timestamped. It's an update mechanism, not an eraser. And the policy carries one narrow replacement exception: if an unauthorized campaign staffer submitted the original survey, campaign leadership can tell Ballotpedia and have it replaced — a one-time fix for a specific mistake, not a general do-over.

In other words: the survey is a record, not a profile you maintain. Draft your answers off-platform, sleep on them, and have one careful reader verify every factual claim — dates, office and district terminology, endorsements, URLs, anything about money or votes — against your filings and your website before you submit. Ballotpedia isn't checking any of it; you are. The standard is a printed mail piece, not a social post.

When the page is wrong about you

The staff-written parts of your candidate page are Ballotpedia's editorial content — it's an encyclopedia, not your press page, and there is no editorial veto. What there is: a documented correction path. Submit Ballotpedia's online "Report an error" form, or email editor@ballotpedia.org with "Reporting an error" in the subject, the specific error, and a credible source for the fix — your filing, the county elections page, a news story. The same sourcing standard runs the other way in Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection policy: a third party who disputes your survey response or your biography is asked to bring a credible source too, not just an objection.

What you shouldn't expect is spin control. Ballotpedia will correct a wrong office, a wrong party, a misspelled name. It will not remove accurate history you'd rather voters not read. The survey is your instrument for adding your framing to the page — which is one more reason to actually use it.

What this does for being found — and what it doesn't

A completed profile will not make a search engine rank you or an assistant cite you, and neither Ballotpedia nor Electbase — nor anyone else — can guarantee inclusion, ranking, or citation by systems whose workings aren't public. We said the same about your own site, and it's true here too. What the profile does is mechanical and real: it adds a structured, crawlable, consistently formatted page about you on a widely used political-information platform — additional discoverable surface area outside your own domain, a clean identity signal separating you from everyone who shares your name, and a place where your positions exist in a format that search engines, researchers, and civic-tech products can access. For a race with a thin public record, that's a meaningful share of everything there is to find, at a cost of staff time rather than media spend. After the profile publishes, periodically check search results and the major assistants to see whether the Ballotpedia page is being surfaced or cited — treat it as monitoring, not a promised outcome.

The Ballotpedia checklist

• Searched Ballotpedia for your race and your name — you know which of the three situations you're in
• Candidate Connection survey drafted off-platform, answering every question you can answer usefully and accurately
• Three key messages written as specific, quotable claims — not values statements
• Ballot-form name used exactly, matching your filings and your website (our discoverability practice)
• Office, district, and year named inside answers where natural
• One careful reader verified every factual claim — dates, office and district terms, endorsements, URLs — against your filings and your site; Ballotpedia won't check them for you
• Photo, endorsements, and campaign links included with the submission where appropriate
• The candidate or the qualified campaign representative who submits available to complete Ballotpedia's Truepic identity verification
• Any errors in the staff-written page reported via Ballotpedia's error form or editor@ballotpedia.org, with a credible source
• Search results and major assistants checked periodically after publication to see whether the profile is surfaced or cited — monitoring, not a guaranteed outcome

Verified against

• Ballotpedia — Survey (submitter rules, Truepic process, accepted IDs, retention, no-fact-check statement, basic-profile policy, retake rules)
• Ballotpedia — Candidate Connection
• Ballotpedia — Our approach to Candidate Connection survey edit and removal requests
• Ballotpedia — Local election coverage, 2026 and its election coverage approach
• Ballotpedia — How to get a Ballotpedia page updated