Why down-ballot matters.
The races further down the ballot — state legislature, judges, county seats — are decided by a fraction
of eligible voters, often by people who know little about the candidates. The numbers tell the story.
~23%
Share of registered voters who had cast a primary ballot by late April 2024 across the 32 states that had
voted by then — about 34 million of 149 million. Primaries decide who even appears on the November ballot.
~80%
Of eligible voters did not vote in the 2022 midterm primaries — turnout was 21.3%. Reformers set a
35% goal for 2026; halfway through this year's primary season only two states had reached it.
60%
Of North Carolina voters in one study could not name a single justice on their own state supreme
court — a court whose seats appear on the very ballots they cast.
Source: a voter-knowledge study cited in a Maine Law faculty publication [Verify — the original study has not been located]
~25%
Average turnout across 340 U.S. mayoral elections in one analysis. Some big-city mayors have won with
single-digit turnout; Philadelphia elected its mayor in 2019 with just 27% turnout.
Source:
FairVote, summarizing a 2013 study of 340 mayoral elections
½
In San Francisco's 2014 election, roughly half of the people who voted skipped the judicial races
entirely — even though nearly everyone marked a choice for president two years earlier.
Source: KQED analysis of San Francisco turnout [Verify — the original article has not been located]
56–68%
General-election turnout in presidential years since 2000, versus just 18–29% in those years' primaries.
In midterm years like 2026, general turnout falls to roughly 40–50% — and drops further down the ballot.
The party-label fallback
Research consistently finds that when voters lack information about down-ballot candidates — state
legislators, judges, county clerks, registers of deeds — they fall back on the party label as a
shortcut, rather than the candidate's record or qualifications. The less voters know, the more a
single letter next to a name decides the outcome. That's exactly the gap this project exists to close.
Source: political-science research on voter heuristics, including work published in the American Political Science Review