Guide
How to find your sample ballot
A sample ballot shows exactly what you'll see at your polling place, so you can mark your choices once, calmly, before Election Day. The authority on your ballot is your state or county elections office — not an aggregator, not a news site. Here's how to find yours.
The quickest way
Open Vote.gov and choose your state. It redirects to that state's own elections office, which is where the official sample ballot lives. If you only have a minute, this is the one link you need — every state's SOS or elections office site has a "sample ballot" or "what's on my ballot" lookup, usually keyed to your registered address.
Nonpartisan sources that cover every state
Four every-state resources pair well with your official sample ballot. Each one does one thing best; use them in combination for a complete picture of what's on the ballot and who's on it.
- Vote.gov
The federal government's elections hub, run by GSA.
Best for: Finding your state and local elections office quickly — Vote.gov redirects to the authority for your state, which is who runs the actual ballot.
- Can I Vote (NASS)
A directory maintained by the National Association of Secretaries of State.
Best for: Confirming you're registered and seeing your polling place; most states' sample-ballot pages are two clicks from here.
- VOTE411
The League of Women Voters' voter-information portal.
Best for: Side-by-side candidate information for races on your ballot, including the down-ballot school board and local judicial contests that are often sparse elsewhere.
- Ballotpedia
An encyclopedia of politics and elections.
Best for: Deeper research into every candidate, measure and incumbent on your ballot, with linked sources and voting records.
Why SchoolBoardNews doesn't run its own ballot lookup
A ballot lookup only helps if it's accurate on Election Day. That accuracy depends on continuously-updated state and county data, redistricting changes, filing deadlines and precinct boundaries — work the state and county elections offices already do, and that the four resources above package into their own tools with real teams behind them. Standing up a fifth one with SchoolBoardNews's resources would mean a worse version of a job those sources already do well, and that could send a reader to the wrong polling place.
SchoolBoardNews covers school board news and public education coverage, linked back to the newsrooms that reported it. For the down-ballot school board races on your ballot, our 2026 school board elections hub routes you to each state's current coverage; for everything else on your ballot, use the four sources above.
Before you vote
- Confirm you're registered to vote at your current address, at Vote.gov or Can I Vote.
- Pull your official sample ballot from your state or county elections office, through Vote.gov.
- Research the races you don't recognize — down-ballot school board, judicial, soil and water conservation, local measures — on VOTE411 and Ballotpedia.
- Mark your choices on the printed sample ballot and bring it with you if your state allows notes at the polling place (most do).
Related
- 2026 school board elections — coverage by state
- SchoolBoardNews editorial standards — how we cover elections, and the conflicts of interest we won't take on.
Sources
- Vote.gov — the official US government site for voter information, run by the General Services Administration. https://vote.gov/
- National Association of Secretaries of State — Can I Vote. https://www.canivote.org/
- League of Women Voters Education Fund — VOTE411. https://www.vote411.org/about
- Ballotpedia — Sample Ballot Lookup, maintained by the Lucy Burns Institute. https://ballotpedia.org/Sample_Ballot_Lookup
Last reviewed 2026-11-02.