Ballotpedia



Ballotpedia is a website that provides information on United States elections and candidates for voters. It started out as a community-contributed site, but is now only edited by paid staff. It has information related to both US Federal government and US state governments, with a database of information on U.S. state executives, legislators, districts, candidates for such positions and ballot measures.

The website claims to be neutral and accurate. At the time of writing, the Media Bias/Fact Check page classifies it as "Least Biased" and "Factual Reporting: Very High". Of course, due to the nature of the site, it does sometimes show decidedly non-factual quotes from other sources (such as public figures). Despite this, the site was founded by the Citizens In Charge Foundation, a libertarian activist organisation. The site is currently run by a remarkably well-fed nonprofit called the Lucy Burns Institute, which is substantially funded by Koch Industries money, funnelled in via various corporate shells. Board members include Erick Erickson.

Although it looks like a wiki and uses MediaWiki as its CMS, it is not publicly editable. Up until 2016 there was a group of "carefully vetted members of the general public" who could edit with every edit first reviewed by staff.

Neutrality and its problems
The co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, was an early consultant for Ballotpedia. Sanger left the leadership of Wikipedia in 2002, and has since become critical of Wikipedia not hewing to a strictly neutral point of view (NPOV). Sanger wrote a 2015 essay on NPOV for Ballotpedia, which presumably also explains Ballotpedia's position on NPOV. Although Sanger acknowledges the existence of "false balance" (balance fallacy), his example of NPOV for global warming is rather skewed away from adequately acknowledging the balance fallacy: A majority of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW); exactly which scientists to include as “experts,” and thus which surveys to consider and what percentage endorse it, is a matter of debate. In any case, while there are some distinguished climate science experts who are skeptics [of AGW], a decided majority are not. Sanger wrote this in 2015, but by 2004 it was already the case that there was scientific consensus and by 2010, it had reached 97-98% agreement among climate scientists that climate change was real and anthropogenic. and has since risen to >99%. Sanger was arguing that there was still a debate on the reality of climate change in 2015, when there wasn't one at all, i.e., the balance fallacy. Arguably, Sanger and subsequently Ballotpedia are NPOV extremists.

Later in the essay, Sanger argued along the lines of supporting the argumentum ad populum fallacy measles vaccination, thereby giving oxygen to Andrew Wakefield's antivax bullshit: For example, suppose in a piece of writing, you discuss the measles vaccination controversy. If you’re going to write in accordance with the canons of science (and also rationality and objectivity, no doubt), then in my opinion, you will support the view that children should be vaccinated, period. But if what you write is going to be neutral with respect to current American society, you will have to withhold any such forthright claim. Rather, you’ll report that while a very large majority of doctors and scientists strongly advise vaccination, something like 9% of the population thinks that the measles vaccine is unsafe. Sanger does not even acknowledge that the Centers for Disease Control says that the MMR vaccine is extremely safe and effective, or that deaths in the US from measles dropped from 503,282 pre-vaccine availability to 89 post-vaccine availability.

Neutrality is all well and good when dealing with easily verified facts, such as who and what is on an election ballot, what responses a candidate for office has given on issues, etc. However, once one starts getting into more complex issues such as science, medicine or general politics, neutrality becomes fraught with the balance fallacy (giving equal weight to refuted or crank ideas), and argumentum ad populum (a logical fallacy that occurs when something is considered to be true or good solely because it is popular).

So, let's throw a bunch of opinions on the wall and you can pick the one that you like.

Dead people voting
From 2014-2018, the staff worked to look like they were putting in more effort than they were. e.g. on the surface, the "Dead people voting news" page looks like it's filled with many news articles of actual cases of dead people voting, but it's just a Google news script of "Dead + People + Voting + [fill-in state]", which is a poorly conceptualized search without any real stories. Since 2018, the page redirects to a "Votes cast in the names of deceased people" page that gives equal weight to the views of the Heritage Foundation, the Government Accountability Office, the Pew Center on the States, and the

Ballotpedia tries to portray the Heritage Foundation ("conservative") and the Brennan Center ("progressive") as simply views on opposite sides of the political spectrum, however the Heritage Foundation is known for spreading bullshit (e.g., climate change denial and evolution denial), whereas the Brennan Center is not. This is a case of the balance fallacy. Both the GAO and the Pew Research Center are nonpartisan.

Face masks
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ballotpedia created two separate web pages showing arguments supporting and opposing face mask requirements (relevant expertise in bold):

Holding expert opinions to be more authoritative and reliable is generally a good thing to do. Not every expert is correct, that's why scientists have disagreements. Consulting a range of experts often gets one closer to the truth or at least to avoiding bad outcomes. In the field of communicable diseases such as COVID, experts would come from the fields of epidemiology, public health, MDs who specialize in infectious diseases, and science journalists (who typically have a science degree and are trained to communicate science to the public). A simple MD (e.g., general practitioner), or an MD in an unrelated field (e.g., surgery) is not an expert in this case.

Here we can see that expertise does not matter to Ballotpedia either for within a position or between positions: only 5/21 opinions supporting and 2/20 opposing positions could be considered written by experts in the field. This is especially peculiar because of Sanger's view on how to present information on NPOV, as well as Sanger's creation of Citizendium, an expertise-based Wiki.

Views on the role of greenhouse gases in global warming
Ballotpedia's page on greenhouse gases in global warming was created on or before 2018 and has not been updated as of 2021 despite evolving science and the establishment of scientific consensus in 2004 or earlier.

Four positions are given for each. The 'support' positions include The IPCC (the summary conclusions of >400 climate scientists ) and three individual climate scientists. The 'oppose' positions include opinions from two organizations affiliated with the fossil fuel industry (NIPCC via Heartland Institute and Global Warming Policy Foundation) and two from individual climate scientists. No real context is given for these opinions, and the opinion of >400 climate scientists is given equal weight with a single climate scientists. This is a false balance (balance fallacy).