What building Before U Vote taught me

Before U Vote started from a simple frustration: most people learn about local races from partisan media, if they learn about them at all. I wanted a site that would tell you what's on your ballot in Marion County, Florida — who's running, what they stand for — without telling you what to think.

The technical build was the easy part. Static site on Cloudflare Pages, custom domain, an email-alert signup wired through a form backend. An evening's work, more or less.

Neutrality is a design constraint

The hard part was editorial. Writing a candidate bio that both sides would call fair is genuinely difficult — every adjective is a decision. I ended up with a simple rule: background, platform in their own words, and sources. No adjectives that do persuasive work. It's the same discipline as writing an audit finding: state the evidence, state the criterion, stop there.

Distribution beats perfection

The site was live and correct, and almost nobody knew it existed. The email-alert backend collects signups and notifies me, but turning signups into actual delivered election alerts is a whole second project — list management, a sending service, timing around election calendars. Building the thing was 40% of the work. Getting it in front of voters is the other 60%.

What I'd do differently

I'd plan the distribution channel before writing a line of code — probably a Facebook page, since that's where the audience actually is. And I'd scope the email backend as its own phase from day one instead of discovering mid-project that "collecting signups" and "sending alerts" are two different systems.

Still, it ships, it works, and it taught me more about scoping a real product than a dozen tutorials. The site is live at beforeuvote.com if you want to see it.