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Ballotpedia is seeking to hire a full-time, 100% remote Election Data Researcher.

Reporting to Ballotpedia’s Director of Research, the Election Data Researcher will be responsible for conducting research and monitoring sources, primarily on the Web, to generate and maintain a comprehensive election date calendar, including elections from the federal and state level all the way down to the smallest cities and school districts. The position will also be responsible for executing complex research protocols about a variety of other political topics.

As an Election Data Researcher, you will grow to develop a good understanding of local election administration processes and know how to appropriately research, categorize, and summarize varying systems to fit the structure required to generate Ballotpedia’s election calendar.

This is a great position for a skilled researcher who is passionate about the opportunity to help expand fact-based, neutral election coverage in the United States for American voters, especially at the local level.

Responsibilities

As an Election Data Researcher, you will:

• Research reliable elections information sources and logic for Ballotpedia’s automated election date crawler technology.
• Monitor and process the results of the automated crawler to generate and maintain Ballotpedia’s election calendar.
• Participate in other Research department activities, including:
  • Conducting election laws research and research on other pertinent political topics
  • Executing detailed protocols for miscellaneous research projects
  • Helping to develop, write, and audit detailed research protocols for miscellaneous projects

Qualifications and Characteristics

An ideal Election Data Researcher will:

• Have exceptional attention to detail and an ability to understand complex processes and consistently follow complex instructions without errors over a large number of iterations.
• Have excellent research skills. They can follow general guidelines to locate appropriate online and direct outreach sources and record information in an organized, concise manner to answer detailed questions.
• Have sharp critical thinking skills and are able to understand the varied structures of a large number of sources and apply more general categories and logical statements to those structures.
• Enjoy organizing their own lives and the world around them through elegant structures. They maintain orderly habits and perceive external disorder as an opportunity to innovate and improve.
• Enjoy receiving and implementing critical feedback for constant improvement.
• Are able to accurately and concisely summarize complex concepts, difficult text, and detailed structures.
• Have a passion for elections, election and voter information, and politics, with a commitment to Ballotpedia’s mission to remain
• They are adept at using utilities such as Google Chrome, Docs and Sheets, or similar tools to navigate, find, and record information from the Internet.

Environment

The Election Data Researcher will work remotely from their home location. All Ballotpedia staff work remotely. To join Ballotpedia, you must have a computer with Internet access.

Ballotpedia has a flexible work environment, BP Flex, in which every employee enjoys unlimited vacation and flexibility in scheduling. Each employee will be oriented to the principles of Ballotpedia’s flexible environment during new employee training.

Compensation

The starting pay range for the Election Data Researcher is $40,000-$50,000/year commensurate with experience.

In addition to salary, Ballotpedia offers an annual benefits stipend equivalent to $8,000 that is paid out in equal increments in each paycheck once an employee becomes benefits eligible. The stipend may be used to pay for a full benefits package, including health, vision, and dental insurance; retirement accounts; and more. If benefits are not elected, the stipend is taxed as regular income and added to salary.

To Apply

To apply, visit the Ballotpedia job opportunities page and fill out the form.

Please attach the following in PDF format:

• résumé
• cover letter detailing your interest in Ballotpedia’s mission, this position and your salary expectations

Please ensure that either your résumé or your cover letter include your current address.

About Ballotpedia

Ballotpedia is a collaborative team of fast learners and creative problem solvers who are eager to work hard to make the world a better place. We believe the world will be a better place if every citizen has access to information to make informed decisions about their vote in every election in which they are eligible to vote: primary, general, and special elections; federal, state, and local offices.

We work diligently to present the available information about elections, candidates, judges, ballot measures, policies, and more in a way that enables our readers to vote with confidence and to act as engaged citizens outside of the polling booth.

Ballotpedia readers, like Ballotpedia staff, are special people.

When we launched in 2007, we did not go out of our way to seek new readers. Starting with our small team of visionary idealists, nerds, and aspiring political journalists, we just wrote the best unbiased online articles we could, especially about ballot measures. Readers found those articles in droves. It turns out there was an unclaimed audience out there—people who wanted straightforward facts about political issues, and were willing to read at length instead of just scanning the headlines.

“If you build it, they will come:'' our readers came to our neutral oasis in growing numbers; we’ve had many millions of lifetime pageviews, we reached nearly half of all voters in 2020, and, in the month surrounding the November 2020 election, we were the 77th most-visited website in the U.S.

We’ve come to realize that we need to meet our readers where they are. In doing so, over the past five years, we’ve grown our email newsletter program from infancy to include more than 1,000,000 opt-in subscribers with more than a dozen newsletters to choose from. We are working in numerous ways to help put our neutral information in front of people at the times when they most need it, including on mobile phones while you’re standing in the voting booth. We firmly believe that our readers, and the mindset we help them cultivate, are essential in a world where too many others are fighting to get us all addicted to sensational posts and the irrational decisions they foster.

If this is a mission you’d be willing to work hard to achieve, and if this is a team you’d be willing to work hard with—JOIN US.