About Bay Ballot

Endorsements for the November 3, 2026 election from voter guides in San Francisco, San Mateo County, Palo Alto and Mountain View.

I've lived in San Francisco since 2012, and both my kids are in SFUSD. Every election since 2016, I've sat down with my ballot and a dozen browser tabs: the Chronicle, the League of Women Voters, the local clubs and unions, a few advocacy groups. I kept a spreadsheet of who endorsed what, to see where the guides agreed and where they split.

Over the years I started sharing that spreadsheet with friends and colleagues to help them vote, and kept running into the same problem. Many of them live outside San Francisco, all over the Bay Area, and my spreadsheet only covered the city.

So I turned it into Bay Ballot: one place for every voter guide in the Bay Area, side by side, one contest at a time, with the reasons each guide gives in its own words. It starts with San Francisco and the Peninsula and will grow from there. It stays up to date as guides publish, and it's free for everyone.

It doesn't tell you how to vote. It shows you what the people who spend time on this are recommending, and why.

Sean Oliver

San Francisco · seanoliver.dev

How guides are found

For each area, I look for every voter guide that publishes endorsements: newspaper editorial boards, party committees, political clubs, labor councils, advocacy groups and civic groups. A guide's endorsements appear once it publishes them for this election.

How endorsements are collected

For most guides, an automated process reads the guide's published pages and records its endorsements, along with short quotes giving its reasons. A separate check confirms each quote appears word for word on the guide's page. Quotes that fail are left out, and endorsements the check can't confirm stay off the site until they're confirmed. A few guides publish their endorsements as images or documents, and I enter those by hand. I monitor the whole process closely. Each quote links to its source or an archived copy. Guides that publish only a list of endorsements show no quotes.

Staying current

Guides are checked for updates every day, and the few that can't be checked automatically are checked by hand. Updates are listed on the changelog.

Open source

All of the code and data are public on GitHub, so anyone can see exactly how it works.

Counting

Only guides that took a position on a contest count toward it.
A guide that ranks candidates counts toward its first choice.
In races with more than one seat, each name a guide endorses counts.
An area's page counts only the guides that cover that area. The Bay Area list counts every guide.

Independence

Bay Ballot makes no endorsements of its own.
It is not affiliated with any guide or campaign.

Privacy

Bay Ballot counts page views with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies.
It never records addresses or ZIP codes.

Corrections

If something here doesn't match what a guide published: