A race describes the electoral process for a certain seat or position. In general, people running for the same position or seat should be in the same race and grouped by geographic designations like districts within that race.
Not everyone in a race will be running against each other – often there are different districts or regions that will have a grouping within a race. For example, a state senate race will have many districts within it.
Create a race
Navigate to an election, and click “New Race” in the header in the upper right, or click “+ New” in the left sidebar.
Types of races
When creating a race, you can choose a “Candidate Race” or a “Ballot Measure”.
- Candidate race: Multiple candidates running, with surveys and individual options for each one
- Ballot measure: Any yes/no choice on the ballot, such as a voter initiative, amendment, etc.
Edit a race
To edit an existing race, navigate to the election it is in and click on the name of the race in the left sidebar, or find it in the election’s “Overview” tab.
There are three important tabs in this view for Candidate races:
- Topics is where you will enter and lay out the topics candidates will respond to. These will become the basis for the comparison screens between candidates.
- Candidates is the actual listing of which candidates will be on the ballot (districts or other groupings are also set here).
- Responses are where each candidate’s responses to the topics are entered.
Ballot Measure races will only have Topics.
Race settings
To edit race settings, navigate to the race and click the “Settings” button in the upper right.
In the race settings page, you can change the display name of the race, its slug (the portion of the URL that uniquely identifies this race) and its description (the publicly-viewable description of the race shown on the web).
Warning: Changing the slug after the race has been published and embedded in a web page will break any existing links it is part of!
Terms & labels
You can customize the terminology used for a number of labels in the user interface for the embeds on your site. (For consistency and documentation, these labels do not affect the terms you will see in the admin side of ElectUp.)
Each term has a singular and plural form of the word.
- Candidates refers generally to people running in the race. For example, on a candidate profile page, this term goes in the “Other Candidates” dropdown allowing quick switching between profiles.
- Groups refers to groups within the candidate setup page. These are often set to “District/Districts”.
- Topics refers to the issues of the race that candidates respond to (sometimes set to “Question/Questions” if emphasizing the candidate’s role in responding to them).
- Positions are the candidate information/response to each topic (sometimes set to “Answer/Answers” if using the “question” terminology for topics).
Status
The status of the race determines its visibility.
- Draft – not publicly visible, even if the election this race is part of is published
- Use election status to mirror what the election is set to – this race is not public if the election is set to “draft” and is public when the election is set to “publish”
It is not possible to publish a race if its election is not published.
By default, it is set to inherit the status of its election. Usually this is a good option – you often want to publish all the races in an election at the same time. However, sometimes a race needs to be held back as a draft, for instance if it’s taking longer than the other races to get all the candidate responses.