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Candidates and ballot research (Home)

Home includes election and ballot-research tools alongside legislative leaders and your Following inventory.

Root navigation: Home → Leaders, Elections, or Following.

Leaders tab

Home → Leaders combines two kinds of legislative information:

  1. Legislative Activity Reports — AI-summarized recent federal legislation from your U.S. senators and representative. Each federal representative card includes a View activity report · {period} link (for example, View activity report · Jan 3rd - 16th) that opens the Biweekly Legislative Activity Report dialog. See weekly-activity-reports.md for eligibility, refresh cadence, and failed-report behavior.
  2. Your State Legislators — contact cards grouped under State Senator and State Representative (when your civic profile includes state legislative districts). Cards show name, term end when available, phone (tel: links), email (mailto: links when available), office address, and official website links when OpenStates provides them.

Tap the info icon beside Your Federal Representatives to view the AI prompt disclosure for Legislative Activity Reports.

Elections tab

Home → Elections combines two areas:

Upcoming elections

A list of elections for your civic area shows election name, date, and jurisdiction. You can add a reminder to your calendar (download .ics or open Google Calendar). Federal races may show FEC enrichment when you expand a row.

Ballot research workflow

On Home → Elections, the Ballot research row includes a tools icon. Tap it to open the Ballot research tools modal. Inside that modal, the generic workflow uses three steps — no election picker in this flow:

Step What you do
1. Find Discover an official sample-ballot source and open the government site to retrieve your public sample ballot
2. Convert Use Symthink's copy-ready external-AI prompt to turn the public ballot content into Symthink Markdown
3. Import Paste the Markdown back, review the draft, and confirm import

Imported elections are added under Vision → Ballot Research. Each election becomes its own branch that you can edit, cite, and publish with your Vision when ready — remember that publishing serializes the entire Vision branch, including Ballot Research.

Seasonal prominence: The Elections tab is available year-round for upcoming elections, but the ballot-research workflow is most relevant in the weeks before an election (official sample ballots typically publish 2–4 weeks ahead). Symthink surfaces a research-start reminder about three weeks before the next election with a known date.

On civic level pages, Civic Ladder → Thinkers may show a Ballot research filter chip when neighbors in your area have published ballot research you can explore.

Using external AI safely

Symthink provides a copy-ready prompt for pasting into an external AI tool along with a public official sample-ballot PDF or text (not voter lookup artifacts). Only upload content that is already public on a government site.

FEC candidate information

Federal candidate cards enriched from FEC data are research aids — they help you learn about federal races but do not define what is on your ballot. Your imported sample ballot is the source of truth for contests and measures.

Saved Ballot Context

After you confirm public context from an official source, Symthink can remember non-sensitive ballot details such as ballot style, precinct code, precinct split, or party ballot context. This lets later Find steps start from what is already known.

Symthink does not store your street address, voter name, date of birth, phone, email, or private lookup answers. Enter those details only on official government election websites, not in Symthink and not in external AI tools.

If your Civic Ladder location or zip code changes, Symthink marks saved ballot context as needing refresh before reuse.