Too young to vote, but not too young to inform voters

BASIS Scottsdale high school senior Karsen Wahal’s parents and older friends ran into a problem as they prepared to vote in Arizona’s August primary election — they found no easy way to find information about the dozens of candidates vying for their vote.

Wahal, 17, cannot vote yet, but he could certainly help his parents research the candidates.

“We started to realize that there was very little consolidated information on any of the candidates running for office, with the exception of a couple, like the U.S. Senate for example,” Wahal said. “Most people probably don’t have the time or the motivation to spend hours and hours researching every candidate on their ballots, and it would be a lot simpler for everybody if we created a consolidated system of candidate and voter information.”

Together with his sister Anya, a sophomore at Georgetown University, and three friends — BASIS junior Madhura Shembekar, Harvard University sophomore Alicia Wu and George Washington University sophomore Anuka Upadhye — Wahal set out to create a resource page before the general election.

They launched their website, thepollingplace.org, in September, and it includes candidate profiles and issue summaries for every federal, statewide, legislative and county-level race in the state, city council elections in the eight most populous cities, as well as school board races in the state’s 11 biggest school districts.

Every candidate page includes a bio, an assortment of key issues, a list of endorsements and a bibliography of sources for voters to find the information themselves. For incumbents, the teens also dug into a handful of bills sponsored during previous legislative sessions.

In the process, they not only helped their parents and other voters, the experience gave them an education they won’t get at school.

“In today’s day and age, politics is increasingly important for everybody, and so I think this is an important educational experience for those of us who can’t vote as to the processes that go into it and the importance of it,” said Shembekar, 16.

They quickly discovered that information on many races can be difficult to find, especially at the local level and in non-competitive legislative districts.

While some candidates have glossy, professionally designed websites that clearly describe background and policy positions, others use homemade sites with HTML straight out of the late 1990s. Some have no web presence at all.

And they realized that, while national, state or local news organizations extensively cover some candidates, their polling place website soon appeared as the top search result for some candidates who receive little to no press.

The work was painstaking.

To create their voter guide, the five co-founders and a handful of other students who joined the project first compiled a spreadsheet with every candidate and then filled it in with information they found on candidate websites, social media pages and news publications. At least two or three other team members read over each bit of text before it’s published to make sure it’s accurate and phrased in an objective, nonpartisan way.

The site is designed to serve as a resource for all voters, but especially for people who are just starting to engage in the political process.

Upadhye and her mother, for instance, are tied into the South Asian community in Arizona and shared the site with immigrants from India who have only recently become naturalized citizens. They also sought to share the website with other nonprofit organizations.

“It’s not that this information doesn’t exist on the internet because we were pulling all of our information from other websites, but it’s that voters don’t have time to do as much in-depth research as we do,” she said.

Looking ahead, the group said they would like to continue maintaining and expanding the website for future election cycles, adding more Arizona communities and even sections for races in other Western states.