About
We are building the tooling down-ballot never got.
Downballot is a small team building campaign infrastructure for the races that sit below the ones everybody watches.
Every cycle, tens of thousands of offices are on ballots across the country. Most of them are contested by people doing it around a job, with a team that is mostly volunteers and a budget that would not cover a week of a congressional race's software.
The tools they are offered are either built for campaigns a hundred times their size, or they are a spreadsheet. Downballot is an attempt at the thing in between: real campaign management and a real supporter CRM, at a scale and a price that make sense for a school board race.
We are working openly about what it does and does not do yet. The product pages say where the limits are, the security page says what we can and cannot claim, and the beta terms commit us to 90 days' notice and an export before anything changes.
What we think
Four things this is built on.
These are the assumptions behind most of the decisions in the product. If you disagree with them, it will probably show.
- The races nobody covers decide the most
- School boards set curriculum. County clerks run elections. State legislatures draw the maps. The attention goes elsewhere and the consequences do not.
- Tooling is a real barrier
- The software built for campaigns is priced and shaped for the top of the ticket. Below that, people run serious operations out of spreadsheets and group chats.
- Consent is not a checkbox
- Who you may contact is a claim someone might have to defend. It should be a record you can show, not a field the last volunteer to touch it overwrote.
- Small teams turn over
- A campaign ends in November and a county committee changes officers in January. Software for this audience has to assume the person who set it up will leave.
Come and use it.
The beta is free, invite-only, and reviewed every Monday. Tell us about your organization and your race.