The races you skip are the ones that actually govern you.
The president doesn't set your property tax; that's your county commission. The school board picks the curriculum. The judges decide the cases you will never get to appeal. The bond measure in the fine print commits your city for twenty years.
Those offices direct an extraordinary amount of public money and write the rules you actually live under; and most of them are decided by the small fraction of voters who bothered to fill in the bottom of the ballot.
And nobody, including you, has researched forty contests.
That isn't laziness; it's arithmetic. Soil and water district, six judicial retentions, three amendments written by lawyers for lawyers. Doing it properly is a weekend of work per election if you knew where to get the information, and you have a job.
So you vote the top two lines, guess a few, and leave the rest blank, like everyone else. The whole system quietly assumes an expertise that few people have the time to acquire.
If you're a wonk or nerd who likes theory (thumbs up to you), read about "rational ignorance" and "public choice." Voting Tree uses computer science to reduce the cost of voting well by helping voters cooperate with advisors and researchers in a trusted hierarchy, benefiting from specialization and division of labor. We cannot prevent voting poorly, but we can reduce the cost of voting well.
You can't become an expert on forty races. You don't have to.
You already know someone whose judgment you'd accept: a writer, a podcaster, a pastor, a group you've been part of for years. And for the parts they don't follow, they know someone.
We assemble your exact ballot from public records, then fill it in from the people you chose to follow, and from whoever those people publicly hand off to. Every single line shows you where it came from.
Exclusively the people you trust
Every recommendation in the app is attached to a real person you chose, or someone he publicly delegated to, never our staff, never a ranking algorithm, never whoever paid the most. You can always explain your own ballot, line by line, to anyone who asks, including yourself.
We're building it. Tell us where you vote.
We're starting with a handful of counties and going deep rather than shallow everywhere. Leave your ZIP and you'll help decide which ones — and we'll email you when yours is live.