About VoteStack
What VoteStack is
VoteStack shows you every race on your ballot and helps you understand the people running. We’re starting with Chicago and suburban Cook County, Illinois. Over time, VoteStack is meant to cover every upcoming election. If you live somewhere else, get an email when VoteStack covers your area.
Seeing what’s on your ballot is the easy part. Knowing who the candidates are is harder, especially for judges and local offices. So every candidate and judge on the ballot has a short profile with the same three parts:
- Overview: who they are, their record and their positions. Judges aren’t allowed to state positions on issues, so theirs cover their experience and work on the bench.
- Campaign money: how much they raised and where it came from, from official filings.
- Endorsements: groups and officials that back them, and bar association ratings for judges.
Every sentence links to its source, so you can check it.
VoteStack doesn’t support or oppose any candidate, party or referendum. It isn’t a government site. We don’t tell you how to vote.
Who makes VoteStack
I’m Nikolai Laba, a voter living in Oak Park (Cook County), IL, trying to build a way to help voters understand their ballot. I wanted one place to see everything on my ballot, explained plainly, with a source for every fact. VoteStack is the tool I wanted.
VoteStack is paid for by its maintainer. It takes no money from candidates, parties or campaigns.
If you’d like to get in touch regarding the project, please reach out to Nikolai@VoteStack.org.
How we stay fair
We follow the same rules for every candidate and every race.
- Candidates are listed in official ballot order. We never change it.
- Every candidate in a race gets the same research, the same parts and the same length limit.
- Profiles for a race appear only when every candidate in it passes our checks.
- We never feature, rank or recommend a candidate.
- Party is shown as text, never as a color.
- We take no money from candidates, parties or campaigns.
How we make profiles explains the research and the checks in detail.
Where ballot information comes from
Election officials decide what is on your ballot. We use the lists they publish.
- For suburban Cook County, the Cook County Clerk’s lists of races, candidates and referenda. The Clerk’s sample ballots tell us which races each precinct gets.
- For Chicago, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners’ list of candidates and referenda. The Board doesn’t publish a sample ballot for each precinct, so we check Chicago districts against the Board’s precinct lists.
- To find your districts, we match your address to Cook County’s address records and to official maps from Cook County, the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois.
We compare our ballots with the Clerk’s sample ballots to find mistakes. When a race may be missing or may not be on your ballot, your ballot says so and links to your official sample ballot.
We mark a candidate as the incumbent only when an official list confirms they hold the seat.
When we last checked
We last checked candidate information on Tuesday, October 13, 2026. Each profile shows the date it was updated.
Races and candidates can change before Election Day. Always confirm your ballot with your election authority.
How we make profiles
An AI model writes each profile from public sources, such as news stories and official records. A second AI model checks every sentence against its source, and software checks every profile before it appears. Every sentence links to its source, so you can check it.
Official ballot order
Candidates are listed in the order they appear on your official ballot. Illinois election law sets that order. Election authorities hold public lotteries to decide which party’s candidates are listed first. Candidates who file at the same time are also ordered by lottery. VoteStack never changes the order.
Your privacy
We use your address once to find your districts. It isn’t saved, logged or added to the page link.
The names you pick, listed under Saved choices, stay on this device. We never see them.
If you sign up for an email when VoteStack covers your area, we save your email address and ZIP code. We use them only for that email and to count where people are asking from, and we never share them. To have them deleted, email nikolai@votestack.org.
Open source
VoteStack’s code is open source under the Apache License 2.0. You can read it on GitHub. The election data we use keeps its publishers’ own terms.
Report an error
Every candidate profile has a “Report an error” link. Use it to tell us what is wrong, with a link to a page that shows the correct information.
We check every report against the profile’s sources and official records. If the profile is wrong, we correct it. We can’t reply to you, because the form doesn’t ask how to reach you.