The Polling Place is a non-profit organization of students, seeking to improve access to non-partisan information about candidates in elections nation-wide.
What we do
We consolidate candidates’ backgrounds, policy platforms, and legislation into comprehensive profiles. We are nonpartisan and data-driven — we want to make informed voting accessible for you. The Polling Place is intended to be a resource for ALL Americans, so you can cast your vote confidently.
We focus on local elections, which are typically neglected by the media and the populace at large. Political apathy in local elections has been increasing in recent decades, despite the fact that local elections often dictate Americans’ lives more than national elections. We hope that our website enables voters to turn out in local elections and vote informed in all races.
We empower youth engagement in politics, by working with young people nationwide to establish local chapters and clubs, host events, research candidates, and become more informed about politics.
To read more about what we do, see Our Mission.
Who we are
We are a team of 130+ high school and college students from over 20 states seeking to empower our communities to vote informed.
We are led by a national Board of Directors. Each state has regional directors, in charge of managing operations for their respective states and leading teams in charge of research, the website, and social media/outreach.
To view our national board and co-founders, see Our Team. To view a states’ directors and team members, click on a state and visit their “Our Team” page.
Who we work with
The Polling Place works with partners around the nation in order to provide more comprehensive election information and to expand our reach. We’ve received grants from organizations like PeaceFirst, worked with networks of youth activists through the Youth Activism Project and Future Coalition, and partnered with local organizations like The Civics Center and Project 320. We’ve been featured by politicians and news organizations in the hopes of expanding our audience.
To see more of the organizations and individuals we’ve worked with, see Acknowledgements.
If you are part of or know any organization that would be interesting in partnering with us, please contact us.
How it all started
In July 2020, five high school and college students in Arizona began researching candidates on their ballots. What we found was shocking – candidate information was inaccessible, disorganized, and often absent. Local elections, which affect Americans’ day-to-day life more than any other, were conspicuously neglected in today’s political climate.
To fill this information void, we founded The Polling Place: a website that consolidated information on all Arizona elections, from the local school board to the County Assessor to the U.S. Senate. We never expected that in just one month, our website would receive more than 20,000 views and garner the support of state-wide and national civic engagement organizations, politicians, and newspapers.
The immense support from the Arizona community underscored the importance of our mission and motivated us to expand our mission nationally. We established applications, templates, guides, and spread the word so that students around the country could join our organization. Today, The Polling Place is a national nonprofit, with dedicated members ready to make informed voting a reality for all Americans.
How you can help
As a relatively new, youth-led nonprofit, we’re always looking for new members, new candidates to research, and new donations.
If you’re interested in any way, see our Get Involved page. For any other questions or concerns, contact us.