Eric Wilson 0:04

Welcome to the Campaign Trend Podcast, where you're joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Derek Wilson. My guest today is Leslie Graves, founder and CEO of Ballotpedia. Today it's more than 750,000 articles, nearly 2 billion lifetime pages, and a sample ballot lookup tool that more than 3 million Americans used in 2024. We're going to dig into why the LLMs lean on Ballotpedia so heavily, how candidates should be filling out the candidate connection survey, and what she's learned about how voters who don't follow the news actually do their research about elections. So, Leslie, you started this way back in 2007 before we even knew what AI was. And I really like this quote where someone called Ballotpedia an outlier in the graveyard of nonpartisan election sites. That is I I would put that front center everywhere. What's the hard part about building infrastructure that nobody thinks about until it's missing or broken?

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Yeah, that's a great question. I I will say it's just great to be here with you. And I also have to say one other thing, which is that, you know, we're six days away eight seven days away from the election and being in politics, I have so much adrenaline coursing through my body, as I'm sure you do, as everybody does, whatever their ideology is. Like, are any of us gonna sleep for the next week? And there's nothing you can do about it until it's over. But anyway. So I'm we appreciate you making time for us, obviously. I'm glad to have some time to spend with you. So when we started Ballotpedia, it wa at that time in 2006 and 2007, it was already the case that you could, if you wanted to drive three hours north of where you live, and you wanted to take your dog with you, and you wanted to know if there was a dog park in this small town you were gonna be, you could already find that on the internet in three seconds. But I I noticed that it was not the case that the all those things that we were routinely expecting to be able to find. It was not the case if you wanted to look up the judge that was gonna be hearing your divorce case or the city council member who you think should be voting, you know, taking more of a position on whatever in your city, and even state legislators, there just wasn't very much information about them. And particularly with the my one big love in life is statewide ballot measures, very poor information. Um, so that's what it was started to do is to create w well-curated, easy to go through inform systematic and structured information so that people could figure all that stuff out. And our particular audience, Eric, that we had in mind were people who maybe weren't going to do that research until three days before the election.

Eric Wilson 2:48

Right. So cramming for uh exam time there, which I think increasingly more people do. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But one thing that the the reason I wanted to chat with you is that we'd been doing some research here at the Center for Campaign Innovation uh about what are the AI platforms saying about candidates and specifically what are they reading to make those answers? And we found that Ballotpedia was cited in about 30% of chatbot answers uh about candidates. Uh it's Google Gemini's favorite source, for example, with 42% of its answers quoting uh citing Ballotpedia. So what is the secret to your success uh when this the whole world is trying to figure out how do we get into LLMs? What is what did you see about LLMs that Ballotpedia tapped into?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah, I think I should make a fortune consulting for for-profit companies on how to do their thing. But anyway, um, well, we didn't know. We got a call from a Politico Pro reporter two months ago, and not based on your research, but a different piece of research that was done, he told us that. And I was like, huh. News to me. I didn't know that we were being cited that often in in the major chatbots. So I had to think about why that is, and I have a couple of reasons. Um imagine you're a 15-year-old kid and you're gonna make some money this summer mowing lawns in your neighborhood. So you're gonna walk around and you're gonna pick the lawns you want to mow. Well, some lawns are flat and they don't have any weeds, and they don't have any rocks, and they don't have a lot of hoo-ha, so you want to mow that lawn. Other lawns are have are full of tiki-tacky stuff, they've got rocks and they're they're not flat. You don't want to mow that lawn because it's gonna take you a heck of a lot more time to mow that lawn. And even though we all think of the AIs as having infinite power and capacity, they don't. They would much rather mow the lawn that's flat and doesn't have a lot of rocks and tiki-tacky stuff in it. So what they're looking for are websites to eat the material from that are extremely well organized, curated the same way from one to the next. So if we have an article about a ballot measure in Arkansas, the order of the information is going to be identical if we're covering a ballot measure in Arkansas and in North Dakota and in California. And that's also true for our coverage of candidates. The order, I mean, this just seems like it couldn't be this simple, but it is. Our information is highly structured. And we highly structured it because that's what our readers prefer. They they don't want to have to deal with a whole new structure as they bop around our pages because many readers spend hours just bopping around on Ballotpedia. Um, they want to see it presented in the same order every time, structure. And that is probably the number one reason that the AI chatbots love to scoot around on Ballotpedia and get that information. The other reason why is because we have some unique or original content that other websites don't have, and that is our candidate connection survey. So we send that out to all the candidates as the year proceeds, as they're filing deadlines and whatnot. Come and go, ask them to fill out the survey. And this year of the state legislative on up through U.S. Senate, about 35 or 40 percent of those candidates will fill out the survey. So the AI chatbots, they love that survey because it gives a lot of information, also always in the same order from one person to the next. That's probably the second reason. And the third reason is that ballotpedia is text-based. Right. And in in the day of, you know, candidates thinking, oh, I, you know, I need to be talking on TikTok or I need to be popping up videos on X, maybe they do need to do that, but the AI machines would prefer not to have to go through the extra steps to listen in and interpret what the the verbal utterances that were said on a video. It's much easier for them to just eat the text. So that that those are the three reasons why I think that that happened.

Eric Wilson 6:46

And for people listening, that that those are the three master class steps in how to make your content more accessible to AI, which is there, you know, we we know that we need more data centers and more chips and all this kind of stuff. So they're trying to figure out how to save their resources and giving a predictable format is the way that they succeed. We we've seen this in other sites on on the partisan side of the fence, where you there's a group that has found a really good structure and they are showing up a ton, and it it really is the structure. And then I think one of the things is is being able to answer the questions that people really have. But I want to come back to the candidate connection survey because that's one of the things that makes ballotpedia different from Wikipedia, because the candidates they're not editing their profiles, but they have some input. So explain to us how that works and what candidates need to do for an effective response.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Yeah, they need to fill out the survey. Um, so ballotpedia, unlike Wikipedia, our ballotpedia is fully staff run. So we have a staff of about 90 people across the country. Anything that shows up on Ballotpedia, we wrote it or we curated it, with the sole exception of the candidate connection survey, in which case those are the words of the candidate speaking to the voters in his or her district. They get to say whatever they want to. I mean, there are some things that they might say that prevent would mean that we're not going to put it on, but those are very major edge cases that are irrelevant for this conversation. But but by and large, it's the opportunity of the candidate to speak their voice to the people who are listening or who want to know about them. And one of the things that I think that is interesting about all of this AI stuff and Ballotpedia doing really well in AI, which we never attempted to do, it just turned out that way because of the way we structured the articles for our readers, is that it has always been the case, because we can see how many people after an election, how many people read this article on Ballotpedia about this uh state attorney general race or whatever. It has always been the case that the number of page views, excuse me, on that page will be anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of the number of people who ended up voting. So if 100,000 people vote in that state attorney general election, I can tell you that our article will have had 20 to 30,000 reads before the election.

Eric Wilson 9:10

That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

So we know that, but so so we've always thought, you know, if you're running for attorney general, it would behoove you to get to talk to 20 or 30 percent of your electorate, yeah.

Eric Wilson 9:22

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Right, to fill out the candidate survey. But for some reason it doesn't click as much. You know, like our article about that attorney general race might be the fourth link in old school search. It just doesn't click as much that a megaton of your voters are reading the ballotpedia article. And it's not just that a megaton of your potential voters are reading the ballotpedia article, it's people who are planning to vote who are reading the ballotpedia article. They are preparing to vote.

Eric Wilson 9:46

No offense, you're not going there for uh for your entertainment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Right. So um so this whole thing with the LLMs has been kind of interesting because it it has led to many more candidates being, oh my gosh, I have to fill out that ballotpedia survey right now. And that is kind of a a new thing for us, but we're we're we're grateful for it because those surveys are such a wonderful way to to tell voters where you're coming from.

Eric Wilson 10:11

Yeah, and I I've just been surprised at how my colleagues and counterparts on the left are are very enthusiastic about Ballotpedia and really encouraging their candidates to complete that survey. Meanwhile, on my side, I'm struggling to get candidates to put a basic issue page on their website. And you've just made the perfect pitch for why candidates need to be more forthcoming about their answers to these questions.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

And that thank you for saying that, because it goes beyond what whether they do or don't fill out the ballotpedia survey. By the way, we can tell which campaign consultants have told their candidates to fill out the ballotpedia survey, because all of a sudden in a week, we'll get every survey from every uh maybe every Democratic candidate for U.S. House in Missouri, like every single one of them. And we're like, okay, that was that didn't happen by accident. Right. Um so I think campaign managers really matter in terms of saying, look, you just gotta do it. Sorry, do it, get it done and get it in right now. But it is also true to your point, Eric, that many candidates, Democratic or Republican, could do a heck of a lot better job using their voice on their campaign website. And it is so there if you're the candidate, there are two kinds of basic things you want to tell your voters, who I am, you know, what's my resume, um, am I married to, you know, all that kind of stuff. Then you want to tell them how you feel about the issues. My observation in an in the LLMs is that the chatbots, if if I go in there and say, can hey, tell them, can you compare these two candidates for me? Um they the person who's doing that doesn't want to know whether one of them is married and has three kids and the other one isn't married and it was divorced. They don't want to know that. They want to know your three or four leading issues and what you said about it. And so if you're not saying that on your website, you're you're just losing an opportunity to to touch a voter who, again, is researching your race because they're trying to figure out how they're gonna vote with um exactly what they want to know, which is what is your stand on the issues.

Eric Wilson 12:11

Aaron Ross Powell And now with AI, it's gonna fill in those gaps if you leave them there, right? That used to be, oh, well, we're not gonna talk about that because then people will ask us questions about it and or we'll get attacked for it, and now that's just not the case because the AI can find and fill in an answer there.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Aaron Ross Powell that that is right. You do put yourself at risk of that. And all or also and they they're not necessarily making up an answer, but here here are things that do happen. It might be that your supporter said something about you on Reddit four years ago about what they heard you say at a town hall about immigration. And if you're not saying anything about your stance on immigration on your website, then the AI who has been asked to find out what you think, they're gonna find that Reddit thread. Right. And that is gonna be the basis for what they tell voters about what you think about immigration. And if you don't take matters into your own hands, then that is what you are inviting that chaos into your life.

Eric Wilson 13:07

You're listening to the campaign trend podcast. I'm speaking with Leslie Graves, founder and CEO of Ballotpedia. So, Leslie, uh, you know, one of the big stories this year, just in publisher internet, is zero-click searches from Google, where people are getting their answer right there and then not clicking through to the website. I I'm worried on your behalf about when people don't need to visit Ballotpedia because you know, Google through Gemini is just showing them the answer, they won't know that you're doing the hard work behind the scenes. Um does that keep you up at night?

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Um, well, it did in 2025 because all publishers are thinking that way. They're like, well, if if all these people are just gonna use AI to get all their answers, they're not gonna click through to my website, whether my website is Politico or the Weather Channel or ESP or whatever, they're just not gonna click through. They're just gonna they're just gonna read it on AI and then go about their business. So yeah, I figured that our traffic would decline this year. And all the publishers talk about how much their traffic would decline, and you hear rather catastrophic figures like 20 to 40 percent declines. And so when we were doing our projections for this year, we were were thinking about that. But I I don't really know why this is true. Our traffic is 20% higher than it was in 2024. So we are we're experiencing no traffic decline and we are experiencing an increase in traffic. And I am not because I don't know why that is, that still makes me nervous because I'm like, well, I I don't know what's working to make that happen. But it could just be that there's more interest in politics. Although it's hard to imagine that there's even more interest in politics this year than there was two years ago. But well, one reason why is because we are covering tens of thousands more uh down ballot candidates, your county sheriffs, your mayors, your city council, your school board candidates. We're covering about 44,000 of those local people this year. And even though those that gets less traffic than you know the big pages, it adds up when you spread it across 44,000 pages.

Eric Wilson 15:19

You're in that long tail. One thing that uh I've spent a lot of time thinking about is is especially in a midterm year where the winner is going to be determined determined by turnout of those infrequent voters. Uh but but one of the divides that we're seeing are the people who are kind of the the news junkies, the political news junkies. They're they know who everyone is and who's running the pack and who's the campaign manager, and then the people who are still showing up in voting, but they avoid the news. Um who is Ballotpedia for? Is it for that that student who's cramming for the test the the night before they go vote, or is it the political junkie? Do you have a read on that?

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, we actually did a really deep dive on who reads ballotpedia. And during the um most months of the year um that are not the six weeks right before an election, we still have a ton of traffic. It's just not nearly as much of a ton of traffic as in that six weeks that we're in right now. Um so the rest of the year, um, it is more the political junkie that's reading website and the website, and we have a growing group of people that read the website at least four times a week and uh and a smaller group, but it's also growing to people who are on ballotpedia ten times a week. Obviously, those people are political junkies.

Eric Wilson 16:33

Um but but I think I have five ballotpedia tabs open right now on my my machine.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

The other thing is that there are primary elections all year long. And many um states hold their city elections or their school board elections in May or March or whatever. Um last year we had an election 50 out of the 52 years of weeks of the year. So there is a lot of election stuff going on the rest of the year. It's not as big of a deal as what's gonna happen on November 3rd, but that happens. But basically, the site was created for anybody that wanted to get comprehensive one-stop shopping that's straight down the middle, no bias, um, when they're preparing to go vote. That's who we created it for, but it turned out to have broader use for political junkies as well.

Eric Wilson 17:21

So one one of the things that I think is also really interesting, and I think Ballotpedia kind of stumbled into this by accident as you you sort of uh describe it, uh, is is we are now increasingly campaigning to two different audiences, the human audience uh and the non-human audience. And so for the human audience, that is sending them text messages, knocking on their doors, uh having those those conversations with friends. Then there's the non-human audience, and that kind of buffers our experience in two ways. One is through the AI and the LLMs, and then the other is through algorithms, determining what content shows up in your feed uh as as more people go into these kind of filter bubbles. What um what what have you learned about the the way you presented the content pre you know when everyone else was chasing video and graphics and all this stuff and you stuck with, hey, this is structured text, it's it's a familiar pattern, um is that still for humans now?

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Yes. So it turns out that the human the the the way that we were doing things all along, where we were always asking ourselves the question, look, what would somebody who shows up on the website five days before the election that feels like they should bone up on the statewide ballot measures or who's running for state legislature legislature, what's the way that we can give them really good, you know, s a significant amount of information without overwhelming them? And so all of the things that we designed were for those people in mind. Structured, it flows easily, uh all that kind of thing. And we are st we are still creating it for human readers. We still have a lot of human readers, but I think that people who are sitting around trying to game out the AI algorithms, or in the earlier days, people who are trying to figure out what's the search engine algorithm at Google, don't game it out. Just think think about what a person would want to have and th write it for them because the algorithms are actually trying to anticipate what humans want. Right. So just figure out what the human beings would want. That's that's the trick. Right. The shortcut is hard work.

Eric Wilson 19:32

Yeah. Um so Leslie, what is what does the future look like for ballotpedia? So you you know, we've got hundreds of thousands of elected offices all over the country. Is AI going to take over developing the content for those down ballot campaigns? Or do you do you think a human needs to always be in that loop? Is your is your staff going to keep getting bigger or or or is AI going to replace them? I don't know if you want to break news on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

You know, it's so funny that um uh what what AI will enable companies like Ballot Pedia and every other company to do is do more work, get more stuff done with the same amount or growing staff. We we had anticipate growing the size of our staff because we are trying to provide robust information about the 500,000 local elected officials, and we're on a seven-year um crusade about that. We're three years into it. So we still have so many more elections to cover. Like again, all the school districts and all that, city councils, mosquito abatement districts, county district attorney. There there is so much stuff that's on the ballot, you know, down here. We've all had that experience. You're voting, I know who I want to vote for for president. And then you get and then you're like, oh heck.

Eric Wilson 20:46

Right. I don't even know what this office does. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Dang it. I once again, I'm at that part of the ballot and I'm like, I got nothing, I got nothing. So we we want to make we want to create a world where people can go all the way down the ballot and be, I know what I'm doing here.

Eric Wilson 21:03

Yeah. I and I think it's a great opportunity for those down ballot candidates because for years it's been really difficult to have kind of the professional campaign presence that you need to have online where you're posting on social media enough, you're doing videos, you're doing emails. And with a platform like Ballotpedia that now latches on to the really powerful distribution of AI, that you can fill out your candidate survey and and make sure people are informed. I I just I think it's a it's a no-brainer. So I'm sure more people are gonna be taking you up on that.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

If if I could I say something a little bit wonky, all right. So we have a federalist system of elections, and that means that our elections are managed by local people. Like in my county, Iowa County, Wisconsin, we elect an election clerk and they manage our elections. And that means that they create our Iowa County election website, and nobody can tell them how to do that. So there are three 3,200 counties across the 50 states. They all do it differently. Right now it would not be possible possible to build an AI, a unilateral AI that could easily and correctly go get all that election information off of all those websites. We have a fetch it tool that is AI inflected that notifies us when wording changed on one of those sites. But we're actually a long way from AI being able to solve those problems. And eventually it'll probably be the case, but we are nowhere near that yet.

Eric Wilson 22:28

Well, my thanks to Leslie for a great conversation and thanks to the great work that you and your team do at Ballotpedia, uh keep the servers going for these next few days here. You can check out Ballotpedia uh at ballotpedia.org and uh or search your favorite AI because it's in there. And uh we'll also include a link to the show notes. So make sure you know all of those offices that are on your ballot. And you know, if this episode made you a little bit smarter, it gave you something to think about, all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. More people learn about the show that way and you're part of the process. You can subscribe to the Campaign Trend Podcast wherever you listen to or watch podcasts, so you've never missed an episode. And be sure to visit our campaign trend.com website for even more with that. I'll say thanks for watching with the next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is subscribed.