With the California primary election fast approaching, it is crucial that citizens across the state seize the opportunity to participate in the political process and ensure that California’s demographic diversity is reflected in our government. A new online tool can help individuals and organizations interested in voting and voter turnout do just that.

In order to vote in a manner that reflects their own interests and concerns, Californians must be well-informed about the candidates and propositions on their ballot — an often challenging task. Voters face great difficulties in cutting through federal and state election noise to find meaningful, nonpartisan information. In addition, information on local elections is often completely unavailable.

In fact, according to a report on millennial voters by the Knight Foundation, lack of information about candidates and issues is the single greatest barrier preventing young voters from casting their ballots in local elections. This underlines the integral role that information plays in raising voter confidence and increasing participation.

In order to empower citizens to overcome this information barrier, MapLight and the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund have joined forces to provide Californians with accessible, high-quality information about their ballot through Voter’s Edge, a nonpartisan online voter guide.

In 2014, Voter’s Edge helped more than 700,000 Californians make informed choices regarding the issues they care about most. After the election, we conducted an in-depth assessment of the guide, which indicated that the greatest value we can offer voters is to provide access to customized and reliable information on local contests — an approach we are replicating in California and expanding to Illinois and New York for the 2016 elections.

With the needs of voters at the forefront of our minds, we have implemented important changes to improve the site’s accessibility for all Californians, including persons with disabilities – and are partnering with Disability Rights California to make civic information available to a wider population than ever before. We also created a Spanish-language version of Voter’s Edge and have partnered with Telemundo to increase our reach among underrepresented, non-English-speaking voters.

Voters Edge can be adapted to look and feel like part of your website. Our newly-launched offering of co-branded subdomains makes it easy for other organizations to integrate a version of Voter’s Edge with their own logo and branding on their websites. Partners may also use an embeddable “ballot-lookup tool” to easily provide their users with nonpartisan ballot information directly from their own websites.

Other partners include New America Media (an association of over 3,000 ethnic media groups), California State Library, and California Counts (an Irvine-funded collaboration between KPCC, KQED, KPBS, and Capital Public Radio).

With the support of The James Irvine Foundation, we are excited to help strengthen our state’s democracy by breaking down barriers to informed voting. We hope to make Voter’s Edge California the gold standard for voter guides across the country.

If you are interested in partnering with us to create a co-branded subdomain or incorporate a ballot lookup tool on your website, please click here for more information and contact Melissa Breach at mbreach@lwvc.org.