BallotReady

Overview

BallotReady is a Chicago, Illinois-based civic technology company that provides nonpartisan information about ballots, candidates, referendums and polling places to voters across the United States. Founded in 2015, it aggregates election data from thousands of sources into a personalised tool: a voter enters an address and receives the specific ballot that voter will face, race by race, from federal offices down to local boards and judges.

The company addresses a well-documented gap in American elections. Attention concentrates on presidential and congressional contests, while most elected officials serve at local level and most ballot decisions concern offices many voters know little about. BallotReady's premise is that voters guess, leave races blank or stay home when information is hard to find, and that a complete, neutral guide delivered on a phone can change that behaviour.

Founding at the University of Chicago

BallotReady was co-founded in 2015 by Aviva Rosman and Alex Niemczewski, both University of Chicago graduates. The idea followed Rosman's own run for local office in 2014, when a friend agreed to support her but admitted she had not known the election was taking place. The founders concluded that even engaged citizens lacked a practical way to learn what was on their entire ballot.

The venture won the University of Chicago's John Edwardson Social New Venture Challenge, receiving seed support that, together with backing associated with the National Science Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the university, let it operate as a social-impact startup. Its first real test was the 2015 Chicago mayoral race, for which an early version launched in December 2014 and drew its first few hundred voters through word of mouth and small advertisements.

Growth to National Coverage

Growth was rapid once the model was proven locally. In 2016 BallotReady expanded to roughly a dozen states, covered more than 15,000 candidates and passed a million visits during the presidential election year. By the 2018 midterms it covered ballots in all fifty states, with information on more than 94,000 candidates, and had added polling-place lookup and make-a-plan-to-vote reminder tools.

University of Chicago reporting on the company's early years said BallotReady had reached more than nine million voters and covered about 95,000 candidates by the approach of the 2020 cycle, employing a core staff of about twenty plus more than one hundred researchers during election periods to aggregate candidate information from official boards of elections, candidate websites, social media, press coverage and endorsers. That human research layer, checking thousands of small races that no single national database lists cleanly, is central to its claim of completeness.

How the Voter Product Works

For an individual voter, the product is deliberately simple. One address produces a whole ballot: every race and measure the voter is eligible to decide, with nonpartisan explanations of candidates and referendums, information on incumbents and current representatives, voter registration instructions and status checks, polling-place locations, and options for early voting and voting by mail tuned to the rules of the voter's exact jurisdiction.

The platform was built mobile-first, offered in multiple languages and built to accessibility standards, reflecting the reality that many voters research their ballot on a phone shortly before voting. Voters can save choices and form a concrete plan for election day, which research on turnout suggests matters as much as information alone. BallotReady presents itself not as a recommender but as preparation, leaving the decision entirely with the voter.

CivicEngine and the Business Platform

BallotReady's business model rests largely on CivicEngine, its platform and application programming interface for organisations. CivicEngine lets nonprofits, advocacy groups, campaigns, educational institutions, brands and media organisations embed BallotReady's data in their own voter guides and turnout tools, including white-label versions that carry the partner's identity.

Through that model the company's reach extends far beyond its own website. Partners use the API to power registration prompts, ballot research and reminders inside products their audiences already use. BallotReady has described a civic database covering more than 500,000 elected officials nationwide, available through API or standard data export, with integrations to voter-file and customer-relationship systems used by organising programmes and dashboards for monitoring engagement in real time.

Platform Partners and Election-Scale Campaigns

The partner strategy produced BallotReady's largest audiences. In 2020, Snapchat integrated BallotReady for in-app voter registration and ballot information, one of several major platform collaborations that year. Company and university accounts from that period credited work with organisations and brands including Snapchat, TikTok, Spotify and the Miami Heat with informing and turning out tens of millions of voters in the 2020 general election.

Earlier partnerships showed the local end of the same model. In 2017 BallotReady worked with the Committee of Seventy, Philadelphia's long-established nonpartisan good-government organisation, to pilot CivicEngine for that city's municipal elections, with content gathered and vetted by the committee's staff. The combination of national data infrastructure and local civic knowledge became a template for later collaborations with community and faith organisations in the 2024 general election.

Data Collection and Nonpartisan Method

Maintaining ballot data is an exercise in aggregation under difficult conditions. The United States has thousands of election jurisdictions, each publishing candidate lists, measures and polling information in different formats and on different schedules. BallotReady aggregates from thousands of sources and employs seasonal researchers to verify candidate details, endorsements and positions, because a single missing school-board race undermines the promise of a complete ballot.

Nonpartisanship is the product's foundation. The company describes its guides as nonpartisan, presenting candidates and measures without recommendation, and its tools have been distributed by platforms and civic groups that require neutrality. That stance also distinguishes it from campaign vendors: BallotReady sells information and mobilisation infrastructure to organisations across civic life rather than persuasion services to one side.

Acquisition by Civitech

In 2025 BallotReady was acquired by Civitech, a fellow civic technology company. The transaction closed on May 22, 2025, folding BallotReady's ballot database and voter-guide tools into a larger civic-technology operation that provides tools for candidates, campaigns and voter engagement. The acquisition reflected consolidation in civic tech, where ballot data, registration tools and campaign software increasingly sit within the same platforms.

For users and partners, the practical significance was continuity of the database. BallotReady's value lies less in any single election-day website than in the maintained, structured record of who is on which ballot, where, and under what rules, a record that other organisations license rather than rebuild. Under new ownership that asset continued to serve the partner network built over the preceding decade.

Geographic Scope and Offices

BallotReady is rooted in Chicago, Illinois, where it was founded at the University of Chicago and tested on a mayoral election, but its scope is national by design. Coverage of all fifty states is essential to its offer to national platforms and brands, which need a single integration that works for a user in any jurisdiction, including the local races that dominate a typical ballot.

That national scope coexists with intensely local content. A ballot in Chicago differs from one a few miles away in suburban Cook County, and polling rules differ across state lines. The company's Chicago base functions as a data and product headquarters for a service whose actual subject matter is every town, district and precinct in the country.

Significance in Civic Information

BallotReady's significance is as an intermediary between official election administration and ordinary voters. Election officials publish accurate information, but in fragmented places and formats; campaigns publish persuasive information, but only about their own races. A nonpartisan aggregator that assembles the entire ballot in one mobile, multilingual place fills a structural hole in democratic information.

A decade after its founding, the company had moved from a campus startup answering a friend's missed local election to infrastructure used by major platforms in a presidential election, and then into a larger civic-tech group. Its trajectory illustrates how voter information itself became a data business, built in Chicago, Illinois, and syndicated through partners to voters in every state.