Hi, I'm Seth
I live in Seminole County, Florida, and I work as an IT manager. I built SpectrumVote because my wife wanted everything on her ballot in one place. Every race, down to the fire district and the soil and water board, with something real about each candidate and plain words about each question. Nothing out there did that.
Questions, corrections or complaints come straight to me: support@spectrumvote.com.
Where I stand, and why it doesn't decide what you see
I'm a registered Democrat. I'm telling you because you should know, and because Florida voter rolls are public anyway. SpectrumVote is built so that my views don't shape what you read:
- Placements come from published research, not from me. Left–right placements use academic scores from Voteview (UCLA), Shor–McCarty (Harvard Dataverse) and DIME (Stanford). How it works.
- AI estimates are labeled, with their confidence, and the AI is never told a candidate's party: it reads only their own record (which sometimes mentions it). Its exact instructions are public. Low confidence shows "unclear," never a guess.
- Every fact links to its source. Where the data comes from.
- The same rules for every candidate and every side. On ballot questions, each side's arguments appear in its own words, the same number for each.
- No endorsements, ever. The site will never tell you how to vote.
If you find a page that treats one side unfairly, tell me. I'll fix it and note the fix on What's new.
How it's made
It's just me, working with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Claude helps write the code, gather candidate lists from thousands of election offices, and research candidates and ballot questions, always from sources it links. I set the rules, review the work, and answer for every page.
Mistakes still happen. When they do, they're fixed and listed publicly on What's new.
Money
SpectrumVote is free, with no ads and no accounts, and your address never reaches us (your browser looks up your districts directly). I pay for it, helped by small donations. It takes no money from candidates, campaigns, parties or PACs, and donations never change what the site shows.
My promise
SpectrumVote will stay nonpartisan and free of opinion: facts, sources, and both sides in their own words, for every voter.
En español: quién hace SpectrumVote
Soy Seth. Vivo en el condado de Seminole, Florida, y trabajo como gerente de tecnología (IT). Creé SpectrumVote porque mi esposa quería toda su boleta en un solo lugar, con información real sobre cada candidato y cada pregunta. Lo hago solo, con la ayuda de Claude, una IA de Anthropic; yo pongo las reglas y reviso el trabajo.
Estoy inscrito como demócrata, y por eso el sitio está hecho para que mis opiniones no decidan lo que ves: las ubicaciones vienen de investigaciones académicas publicadas, los estimados por IA están marcados (y a la IA nunca se le dice el partido del candidato), cada dato enlaza a su fuente y cada lado de una medida aparece con sus propias palabras. Nunca respaldamos a nadie. No aceptamos dinero de candidatos, campañas, partidos ni PACs.
Si una página trata a un lado de forma injusta, escríbeme a support@spectrumvote.com y la corrijo públicamente.