Updating Maine Ballot for an upcoming election

The following things need to be done to update Maine Ballot for each upcoming election.

Right after the previous election

• Change the text on the homepage from the next election date is: to the last election was:
• Add results for any statewide ballot questions as a results section at the top of the question page and in the front matter tags for the question page.

About two months before the next election

• Update the date in the elections.yml file in the _data folder to the next election date. On the homepage, change the text from the last election was to the next election is and change to the next election date.
• If there are no statewide questions yet, put text in that section indicating "There aren't currently any statewide ballot questions on the [election month] ballot."
• Archive local elections page using these instructions.
• Check the Secretary of State's office for statewide ballot questions for the upcoming election.
• If there aren't any yet, check Ballotpedia to see if they know of any upcoming questions.

Once the statewide ballot questions are available

• Create a GitHub issue using the ballot question content template and fill out the sections. Get at least two other people to review the content.
• In the _posts folder, copy one of the older question markdown files for each question and rename it using this format: 2020-11-03-Q1_RankedChoiceVoting.md
• Fill in all the sections from the content in the GitHub issue for the question.
• Create a folder for the election in the assets/img folder and place any images in there.

To update local election websites

• About a month or two before the election, towns will start updating websites
• Add columns to this spreadsheetfor ballot questions, ballot link, ballot link text, drop box, and reviewed for the current election, and move the ones from the previous election to the right of the county for sorting column.

Review the links for each locality starting with towns that have had content for previous elections, and then by county.

• Click on each town in the spreadsheet:
  • Make sure the website still exists, if not search to see if there's a new one to replace it with. Hierarchy of websites (use the first available in this list): election page on town website, homepage on town website, active Facebook page, contact info from maine.gov, inactive Facebook page if it has more accurate contact info than maine.gov, inactive Facebook page without accurate contact info
  • Look for information about whether there are any local ballot questions or candidates or town meetings with different dates than the statewide election - Put this content in the ballot questions column of the spreadsheet
  • Look for a sample ballot or town meeting warrant and put the link in the ballot link column and text indicating what it is in the ballot link text column
  • Look for information about whether there is a drop box for absentee ballots. Put as much detail about where to find the drop box as you can find in the drop box column.
  • Add a "Yes" to the reviewed column, so we know it has been reviewed for the election.

After a bunch of localities have been reviewed, copy the appropriate columns into the local.csv file (but keep the column headers in the csv - the page uses these exact labels in the logic to display the table) in the _data folder and create a Pull Request to update the site.