In my ideal world we'll add icons for things like "does this need to be a proposition" (i.e. bond-funded measures; some pension props), a visual indicator of the $$ at stake (state/municipal assessment if necessary), progress bars for how much campaign money was spent on each prop/candidate (a nice proxy for how contentious something is).
Yeah, echoing another comment: we tried so many rounds of tallies/counts, because visual summaries are so useful from a UX perspective. But there are so many things that quickly start looking partisan. For example: we want to both a) be inclusive and let anyone share their choices as a voter guide, and b) not have visual summaries be a reflection of whatever biased population of users might be using OpenBallot at any time. (Some users gave us early feedback that they thought the visual summary was OpenBallot's recommendation of how they should vote, which we definitely didn't want.)
In general, we're being really conservative with UI atm because we don't want to put ourselves in the position of doing any editorializing that smells partisan. (We even have two sorting methods for guides, one of which is "random", because it's tricky to balance making the big-name guides that people expect discoverable vs hard-coding a sorting method, which we'd prefer not to do, since even that feels partisan).
We've got reams of detailed examples of these types of problems, so if anyone is interested, jump in on Discord! :-)
The guides that we ingested (from source) all capture exactly what content was available upon ingestion time (we don't yet have a way to monitor for changes and auto-refresh, but we're working on that). Those have a "verified" checkmark to show that they've been QA'd by us.
If your friend authored the guide, it means he hasn't (yet?) put his own reasons in. I'd definitely reach out to him and encourage him to add them, since I agree with you that that's what makes this kind of tool really great!
If you think there's some kind of bug / problem, please do join or Discord (I'll edit the post to include it) or just call us out on Twitter. We're very keen to resolve anything that doesn't seem right: https://x.com/OpenBallotApp
Yeah, that's what we do! Try logging in and following your favorite guides; from there you'll see your "ballot view" that (I think) describes exactly what you're after? More whitespace than I'd like (compact view or die!), but I was outnumbered ;-)
As for the "why": I'd love to learn about all of the historical and regulatory incentives here. From what I've managed to cobble together, this is partly due to CAFE standards[1], partly due to Section 179 of the US tax code[2], and possibly(??) due to contractor demand[3].
[1]: In 2006, the NHTSA adopted a "footprint" approach to CAFE standards, where fuel efficiency standards are set based on the vehicle's wheelbase multiplied by its average track width. I haven't dug into why this is the case, but people seem to agree that this results in less stringent fuel economy targets for larger-sized vehicles. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
[2] A key piece of U.S. tax code, Section 179 allows businesses to deduct the full purchase price of qualifying equipment up to $1M(!) For trucks, the vehicle must have a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) over 6000 pounds to qualify for the Section 179 deduction. This incentivizes businesses to purchase larger, heavier trucks. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_179_depreciation_deduc...
[3] A friend told me (citation needed!) that the ability for a truck bed to carry 4x8-foot drywall sheets is often advertised as a selling point (is this true?). I suspect a lot of this is just the US market lusting after "bigger is better", but I'd love to hear anything others know about this.
Ughhhhh -- yes, I constantly dream of a pickup truck on a car-size chassis, and often mentally hack off the back of cars on my jogs to imagine what they'd look like as trucks (my version of imagining girls naked ;-))
In my ideal world we'll add icons for things like "does this need to be a proposition" (i.e. bond-funded measures; some pension props), a visual indicator of the $$ at stake (state/municipal assessment if necessary), progress bars for how much campaign money was spent on each prop/candidate (a nice proxy for how contentious something is).
What other metadata do you think could be useful?