Ballotpedia
Ballotpedia is a website that provides information on United States elections and candidates for voters. It started out as a community-contributed site, but is now only edited by paid staff. It has information related to both US Federal government and US state governments, with a database of information on U.S. state executives, legislators, districts, candidates for such positions and ballot measures.
The website claims to be neutral and accurate. At the time of writing, the Media Bias Fact Check page classifies it as "Least Biased" and "Factual Reporting: High". Of course, due to the nature of the site, it does sometimes show decidedly non-factual quotes from other sources (such as Public Figures). Despite this, the site was founded by the Citizens In Charge Foundation, a libertarian activist organisation. The site is currently run by a remarkably well-fed nonprofit called the Lucy Burns Institute, which is substantially funded by Koch Industries money, funnelled in via various corporate shells.[1] Board members include Erick Erickson.[2]
The staff work to look like they're putting in more effort than they are. e.g. on the surface, the "Dead people voting news" page looks like it's filled with many news articles of actual cases of dead people voting, but it's just a Google news script of "Dead + People + Voting + [fill-in state]", which is a poorly conceptualized search without any real stories.[3]
Although it looks like a wiki and uses MediaWiki as its CMS,[4] it is not broadly publicly editable, though there is an editor status of "carefully vetted members of the general public",[5] with every edit first reviewed by staff.
External links
References
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ballotpedia
- The Lucy Burns Institute (Publishers of Ballotpedia, Judgepedia and WikiFOIA) and Her Right-Wing Bedfellows (Sara Jerving, PRWatch, 26 November 2012)
- https://ballotpedia.org/Dead_people_voting
- https://ballotpedia.org/Special:Version
- https://ballotpedia.org/Ballotpedia:Editors
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