Not ignorant, understandable! And awesome that you’re asking. Those small local races can be the start of someone’s political career, they’re going to be stewarding public funds and setting policy, and they matter!
Side note: Can you get a mail-in ballot so you’re able to do research at your kitchen table while you vote? I’m in a state with 100% mail-in. I miss going to the polling place and am glad the county clerk includes an “I Voted” sticker in the ballot mailing, but I really appreciate being able to take my time with the ballot.
You should be able to find an election website that will list all the races so you can be prepared before you see the ballot. Where I live that would be the county clerk’s office and there’s a dedicated website. I can put in my home address and see which races I’ll be voting on top to bottom.
Some things you can do to research candidates (based on having been actively involved for many years):
Look around for a local organizing group that aligns with your general approach to politics and ask them. They may hold candidate forums, send out questionnaires and share the answers on their website, interview candidates and list endorsed ones, and generally do some of the legwork you’re asking about. Try searching on your town or county name and the political party, if you align with one, or keywords that reflect issues important to you and words like “election 2024”. Search string might be Town + election + 2024 + candidate + keyword1.
A national organization you follow may have local chapters.
This works both ways: Find a group you don’t align with and see who they’re endorsing. Sad that politics is so polarized now, and some nonpartisan races may actually have support from different places on the political spectrum, but “the friend of my enemy isn’t someone I’ll vote for” can serve as a shorthand decision-making tool, or at least as data.
Your state may have an independent statewide organization that puts out a voters’ guide. It likely wouldn’t go down to the hyperlocal level but they may include state supreme court judges. Again, may be multiple ones of these from different political stances.
League of Women Voters: Find the local chapter and ask them for resources. They may host candidate forums.
There will be organizations that care about candidates in these races for a specific reason, like a conservation group or the Chamber of Commerce. They’ll do endorsements, share candidate questionnaire responses and the like. You can use this information regardless of whether you agree with or oppose what they stand for.
For judges’ races, look up the state bar association and their endorsements.
For school district, find the local teachers’ union and look at their endorsements.
If you have a local paper, has it done any articles? What are people saying about candidates in the letters to the editor? (A pause to mourn the slow death of local journalism because this is one of the many things it contributes to civic life.) If not a local paper, then an active community blog?
If the candidates do have a website, are they endorsed by people you recognize and/or by other candidates you support? Use that as a guidepost; that’s why they work to gain those endorsements.
Look up your state’s campaign financing disclosure information and review their donations. Are they getting money from PACs that stand for things you agree/disagree with? Use that as a guide; those PACs did their research before donating. Caveat on this: Some PACs give to both sides to hedge their bets so don’t take one donation as the answer; look for patterns.
The personal approach: Ask people you know who are affected by that position. If you have a friend with kids in school, ask them about the school board race. If you know an attorney, ask them about the judges. If they work for a nonprofit that gets funding from the county, ask them about the county commissioners and how they’re handling the budgeting process. For that matter, if you know one of the people in a role, like a school board member, you can ask them about the candidates for other positions who would be their colleagues in governance. They may or may not be taking a position in a race, but they might be able at least to share the characteristics they think are important for the role and there may be clues in that.
And good ol’ Dr. Google may bring you to public statements by a candidate that tell you definitively you do or don’t want them making decisions about other people’s lives.
Thank you for voting! People died for all of us to have the right to do this.
And in *every single election* someone is going to win, regardless of whether the choices are perfect. Not voting abdicates your responsibility and is like casting a vote for the greater of two evils (with the stakes obviously being much higher in some races than in others).
It matters.