Getting ‘Wise’ at the Ballot Box
Alum’s New Website Helps Voters Easily See Where Candidates Stand on Major Issues
A new website co-created by a UMD alum, called BallotWise, gives voters easy access to information about where political candidates stand on key issues.
Illustration by iStock
Election Day is tomorrow, but don’t panic if you haven’t had time to fully research candidates’ platforms between cramming for midterms or finishing your latest experiment in the lab.
A new nonpartisan website co-created by University of Maryland grad Logan Delavan-Hoover ’24, called BallotWise, makes it simple for voters to see where candidates “from the White House to the state house” stand on key issues.
What sets the website apart is its focus on politicians’ actions, not just their statements, said Delavan-Hoover. “Anyone can make campaign promises. But we’re showing how they voted.”
Users simply input their ZIP code and they can get a list of who’s running to represent them, including presidential, gubernatorial, congressional and state legislative candidates. Then, they can click on names to see how they voted on major bills (or issued executive orders or vetoes) for 10 topics, including the environment, health care, gun violence and foreign policy, based on voters’ top issues from The New York Times/Siena Poll.
“It’s often very difficult to access candidates’ records. It’s all couched in legislative jargon,” said Delavan-Hoover. “It can be difficult to tell what bills are important for what issues. So instead of having to rely on partisan sources or campaign websites, the idea is to make all of that information more easily accessible.”
He credits his late grandmother, Bette Hoover, one of the co-founders of the immigrant advocacy organization CASA de Maryland, who always took him along to rallies and protests in Washington, D.C., for inspiring him to pursue an economics degree and a career in policy.
Logan Delavan-Hoover '24 (left) and Lauren Perl during their internship on Capitol Hill
That led him to intern for U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin through UMD’s Rawlings Undergraduate Leadership Fellows Program in spring 2024, where he met co-founder Lauren Perl, a Harvard student. When she approached him just before graduation to work together on a project to empower voters, he was eager to help. Throughout the summer, they and third co-founder Ayyub Abdulrezak (the site’s lead programmer), along with another 15 or so friends who volunteered their time, worked to pull tons of data and develop the website.
They launched the website in early October, and got a boost when Perl spoke at the Athens Democracy Forum, where she was interviewed in The New York Times for her work on BallotWise.
“Effective organizing is about changing the minds of decision makers and community members alike,” she told the Times. “To do that, we must focus on fostering civic discourse about the issues plaguing our community.”
With just a few months to create the site, they limited their scope to about 800 bills from four years of voting data. In addition, they didn’t want to overwhelm users with too many results, so they opted to show just one significant vote per issue, per candidate (though they go more in-depth for the presidential race). As the website’s policy lead, Delavan-Hoover analyzed the number of co-sponsors for each bill, the contentiousness of the final vote and its estimated impact to determine which one to display for users. The team used AI to create legislative summaries, which he and his collaborators then fact-checked.
“BallotWise is meant for people in any age bracket, any demographic, any political leaning,” he said, though it will be especially helpful for undecided and less-informed voters. He hopes it will be especially useful for peers in his age group, who “may not have the time or background knowledge to research candidates.”
For future elections, Delavan-Hoover hopes to expand to more local races, and welcomes feedback from users on what data they would like to see included.
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