If you're like most Californians, you've felt the weight of November's ballot, literally.
From the governor’s race to more than a dozen ballot measures, the packed ballot may feel daunting to Golden State voters who already feel pressed for time.
Voter guides from newspapers, advocacy groups, and other organizations can be a first step for voters who want to make informed decisions aligned with their values.
But what if you want to compare them? They’re likely spread across various websites, leaving voters facing (web)pages of decisions again.
That’s where OpenBallot comes in, an online application that brings voter guides for California’s upcoming general election together in one place.
“We're just really excited to be able to make a tool that helps
people vote faster and easier,” Rose Bloomin, one of the application's founders, said in an interview.
For California’s upcoming general election, the app offers more than 200 voter guides, Bloomin said. The app covers November ballot measures and statewide office races.
"If you live in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, or San Diego, then you can see your local races and propositions as well,” she said.
Bloomin said the six founders set out to create a way to help voters make decisions based on their own values, in hopes of “strengthening democracy.”
How OpenBallot works
The voter guides span across the political spectrum, from the state’s Green, Republican, and Democratic parties. It also includes recommendations from newspapers such as the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times, as well as labor unions and advocacy groups such as SEIU and the California Taxpayers Association.
Once you open the web app, you’ll see a grid with the 14 propositions and eight statewide office races on the left. The voter guide names span the top row. Below those, you will see a “yes” or “no,” denoting a voter guide’s recommendation for a proposition. For the statewide races, you will see the last names of the candidates the voter guides suggest. If a statement accompanies the voter guide’s preference, voters can expand the box to read more.
Additionally, voters can do a deep dive into each entry and see all the positions on a particular initiative or race.
“You can add guides. You can remove guides. You can scroll down and see all the races, all the propositions. You can log in if you want,” Bloomin said.
While users can log in to save their preferences, they don't need to log in to browse the voter guides.
The app also lets voters create their own guides. If voters don't see a guide they’d like added, they can reach out to the OpenBallot team, which will add it for them.
"We don't take a position on anything,” Bloomin said. “We're just trying to help voters figure out how to vote according to their values faster.”
Spreadsheets spark idea
Bloomin said the idea to develop an application that hosts different voter guides in one place for any given election grew out of a need.
“I have a few friends that would make these voter guide spreadsheets for every election,” she said. “They'd go through by hand, type it in, and I would be waiting for these spreadsheets.”
The group of Bay Area friends realized there had to be an easier way to compare voter guides. One friend, Malcob Handley, suggested building a web application to host the voter guides.
“We just started working on it as a side project,” Bloomin said.
Since launching in 2024, Bloomin said the team has launched the application four times: the 2024 general election, the 2025 special election, the June primary, and the 2026 midterm election.
From the team’s first iteration to now, Bloomin said they’ve learned they need to make things simple.
“People don't want to log in. You know, as our friends know us, but other people are like, 'Wait, you want me to log in and like with my real email?’”
The team realized that their users were right.
“Voting is a very sensitive, private thing, and a lot of people might be afraid to log in on some tool,” she said.
The display has also been simplified.
“We've kind of shifted to this; we call it the grid view. That's just this super easy. Here it is,” Bloomin said.
‘Something that's useful to the average voter’
While users can do a deep dive on the issues, it’s simple enough to use even if you have limited time to vote, Bloomin said.
“If you don't have that kind of time or energy ... you've got like 15 minutes to vote, then we make it so that you can do it in an easy way and feel like you're using trusted sources and voting according to your values,” Bloomin said.
The app was created not with the highly political person who wants “to really get in on the nitty-gritty” in mind, Bloomin said.
“We want this to be something that's useful to the average voter who doesn’t always know what’s going on but feels that responsibility of: ‘It’s my civic duty to vote, and I want to do a good job, but it's really hard to do it well,’” Bloomin said.
Her hope is that people can use OpenBallot when they’re unsure about an initiative or race, Bloomin said
“Instead of glazing it over, skipping, or just guessing, they'll actually be able to use their trusted sources to vote in a way that they can feel good about,” Bloomin said.
California voters can find OpenBallot at openballot.app.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Free app brings California voter guides together in one place
