🎵 It's the most wonderful time of the year. 🎵
You know—the time people set aside their differences and come together as a community to engage in simplistic ad hominem attacks for non-partisan elections!
Of course, some of us would prefer to put the non back in non-partisan and work to view elections through the lens of the actual scope of the positions' actual responsibilities—which is where tricitiesvote.com comes in.
After receiving some harsh civics lessons through the failure of our initiative to build a public market in Richland, I started building tricitiesvote.com in 2019.
It began because of conversations with people I'd run into at coffee shops and around town—everyone wanted to talk about the market and why the effort failed so spectacularly, but also how we get informed about voting for local representatives. It really became clear that many Tri-Citizens would like to be more informed about local elections but many people are skeptical of getting local election perspective from a single source—non-partisan positions just don't parse well through simplistic partisan lenses, and the voter's pamphlet isn't enough. But even more than that, it's hard to find information. You'd have to click through dozens of sites and you'd have to know where to look.
Thus tricitiesvote.com is a strictly non-partisan community-driven resource providing publicly available information on candidates, capturing as much public data as we can find without trying to interpret or spin it, and working on creating a guide that lets people make up their own mind based on who they align with.
The 2025 edition of the tricitiesvote.com election guide features links to letters to the editor in the Herald, donor data, candidate questionnaires from the League of Women Voters, Tri-City Herald, Tri-Cities Regional Chamber, and others. tricitiesvote.com will publish any and all written, reasoned endorsements the site can link to, including letters to the editor and public social media posts. In order to ensure accuracy, all data on the site must come with a link to a public source attached.
tricitiesvote.com also has its own questionnaire which includes a handful of A/B statements to make it easy for voters to visually compare candidates on issues. We also give candidates the ability to elaborate on their answers. (See the aggregate view of the A/B questions below.)
On behalf of the volunteers who contribute, we hope the guide is helpful to you.
