Nonpartisan offices make up a majority—58%—of those Ballotpedia has covered since 2023

By

Ballotpedia staff

Welcome to the Friday, June 13, Brew. 

By: Briana Ryan

Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:

  1. Nonpartisan offices make up a majority—58%—of those Ballotpedia has covered since 2023
  2. Defining what we mean by robust information, by Leslie Graves, Ballotpedia Founder and CEO
  3. Five new ballot measures have been certified for 2025, and two new measures have been certified for 2026

Nonpartisan offices make up a majority—58%—of those Ballotpedia has covered since 2023

Since 2023, we have covered elections for approximately 66,000 local offices, of which 58% have been nonpartisan.

In this analysis, a nonpartisan office is one where voters elect candidates who run without any party labels on the ballot. A partisan office, on the other hand, is one where candidates either secure a party’s nomination or otherwise can appear on the ballot with their chosen labels.

These totals reflect our growing coverage of local elections since 2023 and only account for offices that have held at least one election since then. Today, we offer comprehensive local election coverage in 26 states, which includes offices up and down the ballot. This is in addition to our normal local election coverage which includes the nation’s 100 most populous cities, its 200 largest school districts, and all state capitals.

Whether an office is nonpartisan or partisan depends on state or local laws, which often differ between specific office types.

In 2023, our local election coverage was largely limited to school board elections in 10 states. This figure accounts for the apparent spike in the image above, showing 85% of offices covered that year as nonpartisan. Most school boards are nonpartisan, with 40 of the 50 states requiring their districts to hold nonpartisan elections.

Since 2023, we have covered elections for 2,568 special-purpose district offices, including fire control, irrigation, and library districts. Almost all of these offices—2,477, or 96%—are nonpartisan.

Only 26% of the 13,866 county-level offices are nonpartisan, while 74% are partisan.

In the 26 states where we’re offering comprehensive local coverage this year, we found that local offices in California, Hawaii, and Minnesota are almost exclusively nonpartisan. The elections we’ve covered are mostly partisan in Illinois, Michigan, and New Mexico.

While the distinction between nonpartisan and partisan offices may seem obvious, things are often more complicated in practice.

In Illinois, for example, certain offices—like those in villages—are technically nonpartisan, but candidates can run with certain labels other than those belonging to major parties.

Of the 12,554 local offices Ballotpedia has covered in Illinois, 4,946 fall into this category. In 2025, candidates for these offices ran with labels like Township Improvement, Right Choice, and Wauconda Screams 4 Ice Cream. Since these labels appeared on the ballot, we counted those offices as partisan for this analysis.

Click here to learn more about our expanded local election coverage. Also, click here to learn more about party labels in elections nationwide.

Defining what we mean by robust information

Ballotpedia has a rich internal language to describe some of our most important concepts, projects, and goals. But without context, they mean nothing to you. Take, for example, a term you may have seen mentioned in a Brew article or elsewhere on our website: “robust information.” 

To most people, that term probably means our information is strong and will hold up under extensive use. But we’ve added layers of meaning to it that you won’t find in any dictionary. 

Ballotpedia uses the term robust information to describe the number, depth, and variety of information we have collected about candidates. This information allows voters to make informed, confident decisions on Election Day.

In other words, we’re not just talking about a candidate’s name and the office they are running for — though all too often, that is the sum total of the information many voters will have about the candidates on their ballots.

In our definition, robust information begins with our Candidate Connection survey. We consider this the gold standard of robust information because it gives voters the most complete picture of a candidate’s views, background, and philosophy. It also gives candidates the unparalleled opportunity to make direct, unfiltered connections with voters.

Robust information also includes data on any endorsements a candidate has received because endorsements can give strong clues about a candidate’s overall political philosophy and specific views on policy. Endorsements sometimes include financial contributions to, or independent expenditures on behalf of, a candidate’s campaign (we coined the term satellite groups for these organizations, but that’s a term for another column).

We also look for themes or issues a candidate is running on. These can come from the candidate’s campaign websites, local news coverage, debates, and so on. It may seem easy to find this information because of the extensive campaign coverage we see across multiple platforms in congressional and presidential elections. 

But remember that more than 99 percent of all elected officials are at the local level. Many of these campaigns are run on shoestring budgets in localities where media coverage of local politics has either been drastically reduced or eliminated entirely. Finding campaign themes for the tens of thousands of candidates running for office in these circumstances takes a lot of time and effort.

We also search for any pledges a candidate may have signed to support or oppose certain policies. Such pledges have multiplied over the years for congressional and state-level candidates and are beginning to spread to local elections, too.

Alongside the pledges some groups ask candidates to sign are the ratings organizations create on incumbents’ voting records. Such ratings can provide insights not just into how incumbents have voted on particular issues, but also into their broader policy priorities.

These are the central pillars of what we call robust information. Once assembled, we share it on platforms like individual candidate pages, on our website, and on our Sample Ballot Lookup tool. 

Our long-term goal is to provide robust information on every candidate in every election held in the country. In the 2024 election, we were able to provide voters with robust information from 31,914 candidates in 13,769 races. That represented roughly 29 percent of all elections that year.

We have a long way to go. But we’re confident that we will be able to deliver on our promise to provide robust information about every candidate by 2034.

There are a few things you can do to help us reach this goal:

  1. If you are or you know a candidate, urge them to complete the Candidate Connection survey.
  2. If you want to put your love of politics to work in this ground-breaking effort, become a Ballotpedia volunteer. 

And above all, stay engaged in the democratic process — because engaged voters are essential to the health and success of our experiment in self-governance.

Five new ballot measures have been certified for 2025, and two new measures have been certified for 2026

As of June 10, the number of certified statewide ballot measures for both 2025 and 2026 is trending above average compared to previous election cycles.

Twenty-seven measures have been certified for the 2025 ballot in Colorado, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Voters have already decided on six measures, while the other 21 are scheduled for elections on Nov. 4.

Over the past two weeks, five new measures—four in Texas and one in New York—were certified for the Nov. 4, 2025 ballot:

Forty-five measures have been certified for the 2026 ballot in 27 states. Over the past two weeks, two new measures have been certified in two states:

Signatures were verified for two indirect initiatives in Maine, which would appear on the Nov. 4, 2025 ballot. Since these are indirect citizen initiatives, the Maine Legislature can pass them outright. Otherwise, voters will decide these initiatives.

Signatures for a veto referendum concerning House Bill 267 were filed in Utah. On May 8, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (R) announced that her office verified 251,274 signatures. There is now a 45-day period for citizens to remove their signatures before the referendum can be certified for the 2026 ballot.

The next signature deadlines for initiatives intended for the Nov. 4, 2025, ballot are July 2 in Ohio and July 3 in Washington.

Click here for a deep dive into the measures certified for the 2026 ballot. You can also check out certifications for the 2025 ballot here.