Editorial Policy

1. Editorial Mission

board-of-elections.org/ exists to make U.S. state and local election authority contacts and procedures easy to find and use. The audience is broad: a first-time voter looking for the registration deadline, a recently-moved voter updating their address, a military service member trying to vote from overseas, a voter with a disability looking for accessible voting options, an election worker applicant, a journalist filing a public-records request, an attorney researching state election law, a poll worker training for the next cycle. Every page is written so that a non-expert reader can find the right contact, understand the right procedure, and reach the right office on the first try.

2. Nonpartisan Position

board-of-elections.org/ is strictly nonpartisan. Editorial staff do not use the site for political advocacy, do not endorse candidates or parties, and do not characterise specific election rules as fair or unfair. Where state law is changing or contested, we describe the rule currently in force and link to the state authority's published current guidance. Where a recent court decision has materially altered the rule, we update the page and note the change. We do not opine on whether a rule should be changed.

3. Independence

We are not affiliated with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Section, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), any state election authority, any candidate or campaign, any political party, any political action committee, any ballot measure committee, any lobbying organisation, any voter registration organisation, or any election-litigation organisation. Our publication is privately operated and editorially independent. Decisions about what to cover, how to describe procedures, and what we link to are made by editorial staff, not by advertisers.

4. Six-Tier Source Hierarchy

Every page is built using a tested source hierarchy. Higher-tier sources govern when sources conflict.

5. Seven-Step Verification Process

1. Identify the right source. Cross-check the state agency name and URL against NASS at nass.org and NASED at nased.org; for local agencies, against the state authority’s county directory.
2. Verify URL is live. A human editor clicks every link before publication and confirms the destination page is the actual page (not a redirect to a generic agency homepage or a “page not found”).
3. Dial-test phone numbers. Main line, voter help line, election complaint line, public-records line — each tested.
4. Verify addresses against agency contact pages and USPS ZIP+4 lookup. Main agency, separate elections division, and county election offices are sometimes at different physical addresses — each is captured separately.
5. Document election rules from the state’s own published guidance. Voter registration deadline, voter ID rule, absentee/mail-in framework, early voting window, provisional ballot rule — captured from the agency’s published guidance, not third-party summary.
6. Cross-reference federal layer. EAC, FEC, DOJ, FVAP, CISA — each documented from the federal agency’s own page.
7. Editor sign-off. A second editor reviews end-to-end, including a fresh check on the not-legal-advice notice and a neutrality review on any election-rule description that touches contested ground.

6. Pre-Election Heightened Review Cadence

Every state page is reviewed quarterly under our default cycle. In the 90 days before any federal general election (and in the 60 days before any federal primary, state general, or state primary the page covers), state pages are reviewed on a heightened cadence — typically weekly for the highest-traffic pages — to catch any rule change, court decision, or agency update that could affect voters.

Reviews include: live-link check on every external URL, dial-test of main phone numbers, refresh of registration and ballot-request deadlines, refresh of voter ID rules where state law has been amended, refresh of polling place hours and early voting windows. Any material change is flagged on the page with a “Recently updated” notice for 30 days.

7. Contested Rule Protocol

Some election rules — voter ID, mail-in voting eligibility, drop boxes, voter list maintenance, early voting hours — are politically contested and frequently litigated. Our protocol on contested rules is straightforward:

• We describe the rule as currently in force. We do not describe a rule as it “should be” or as critics or supporters say it “really is” — we describe what state law and current state-authority guidance say.
• We link to the state authority’s current published guidance. Where the state authority maintains a guidance page on a contested rule, we link directly so readers can verify the current state.
• We note recent court decisions that have materially changed the rule. If a federal or state court has materially changed the rule’s operation between our last update and now, we note the change and the citation.
• We do not characterise. We do not call any rule “restrictive,” “permissive,” “common-sense,” “voter-suppressive,” or any similar value-laden term. We describe operation.
• We route challenges to the right authority. If a reader believes a rule is being misapplied, we route to the state election authority, the state AG election unit, the U.S. DOJ Voting Section, or Election Protection — depending on the nature of the concern.

8. Election Integrity Claims

9. Corrections

• Acknowledge within 1 business day. Every correction email gets a human acknowledgement.
• Verify within 7 business days. We re-check against the agency’s own page and respond.
• Expedited path for actively-broken contacts. Phone numbers that don’t work and addresses that USPS rejects get a 48-hour target.
• Pre-election immediate-response path. In the 90 days before a federal general election, broken-contact reports and rule-change reports get an immediate-response target — same-day where possible.
• Material corrections are noted. Where a substantive fact has changed (deadline change, voter ID rule amendment, court decision), the page is updated and the next review timestamp is reset.
• We do not retroactively edit history. If a page is materially wrong, we fix the current version and note the correction at the bottom for at least 30 days.

10. Conflicts of Interest

Editorial staff do not hold financial interests in: any state or federal election agency, any candidate or campaign, any political party, any political action committee, any ballot measure committee, any election-litigation organisation, any voting-technology vendor, any voter list or voter data vendor, any background-check or CRA business, or any company whose products or services we describe directly. Editorial staff are not active campaign staff or party officials. Editorial staff may vote in elections — that is not a conflict; using the platform to advocate is.

11. AI & Automation Policy

We use software tools for spell-check, grammar review, and routine drafting assistance — like most modern publications. However, no editorial fact, contact detail, URL, address, phone number, deadline, or rule on board-of-elections.org/ is published from AI without human verification against the originating agency source. Every page passes through human editorial review, including the seven-step verification process described above. We do not auto-generate or auto-publish state pages, and we do not auto-generate descriptions of election rules. The neutrality required for nonpartisan election coverage requires a human editor.

12. Commercial Position

The site is funded by display advertising. The official agency contact always comes first on every page, before any commercial reference. We do not take advertising from:

• Any candidate, political party, political action committee, ballot measure committee, lobbying organisation, or dark-money group
• Any operation marketing voter registration “expediting” services or voter-list “removal” services outside the state’s NVRA-compliant maintenance process
• Any operation selling FCRA-prohibited background-check products dressed up as voter-screening or candidate-screening tools
• Any operation that misuses voter registration data for FCRA-prohibited purposes
• Any operation marketing as if it were a federal or state election agency
• Any operation that promotes election misinformation or makes unsupported claims about election outcomes or election integrity

13. Editorial Staff & Bylines

board-of-elections.org/ operates under a unified editorial byline ("board-of-elections.org/ Editorial") because state guides are produced and reviewed by multiple editors. Editorial staff have no public political affiliations on this byline. For specific source attribution on any factual statement, see the page's footnotes or contact us.