Who ARE these people anyway?

Hi everyone,

If you live in California, your June 2 primary ballot is on its way (or already in your hands). Open the Governor section and you’ll see sixty candidates. The ballot designations under each name tell you almost nothing:

Mathematician · Family Care Navigator · Father · Climate Advocate · Retired Nuclear Engineer · Square Dance Caller · LivingForGod AndCountry DeMott

That’s the actual experience of opening a California ballot. Who are these people? No commentator covers all of them. No newspaper endorsement reaches half of them. And the down-ballot statewide offices — Lieutenant Governor, Insurance Commissioner, Superintendent of Public Instruction — barely get covered at all even though they have enormous power over how the state actually runs.

So we built a page for that.

What’s live

→ election2026.net/california-primary-2026

Every certified statewide candidate from the official California Secretary of State roster — eleven offices, about 150 candidates — grouped by office and party, with the official ballot designation listed exactly as filed. Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer, Attorney General, Insurance Commissioner, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the four Board of Equalization seats.

The actual feature: click any candidate

Click any candidate’s card and a research panel slides in with the same eleven questions Quarex asks of every politician in the library. Same eleven questions for the sitting U.S. Representative you already know, and same eleven for the No Party Preference candidate whose entire ballot designation is the single word “Father.” (There are two of those, actually, in the Governor field alone.) No favorites, no editorial selection of who deserves scrutiny.

The eleven questions:

Who is this person?
What are their core policy positions?
Who funds their campaign, and in what approximate amounts?
What false or misleading public claims have they made in the last 30 days?
What does their social media history reveal about their behavior and conduct?
What major controversies, scandals, or ethical concerns have surrounded them?
Do they have a criminal record, history of bankruptcy, or any other significant legal issues?
What conflicts of interest exist between their public role and their financial, business, or personal ties?
What is their long-term record of truthfulness, accuracy, and public credibility?
Who materially or politically benefits the most from their agenda?
Who is most likely to be harmed, excluded, or disadvantaged by their agenda?

Click any one of those eleven and the Quarex AI — with live web search — researches it for that specific candidate and streams the answer back. Pick the questions you care about, ignore the ones you don’t.

The point isn’t to tell you who to vote for. The point is to close the gap between the names on the ballot and what you can know about them, in the time you actually have before the ballot is due.

What the page deliberately doesn’t do

No statewide propositions — because none qualified for this primary. The three already-qualified propositions (on voting thresholds, recall reform, and public campaign financing) appear on the November 3 general election ballot, not June 2. We’ll publish a California General 2026 page closer to then.
No local races or measures — we don’t pretend to know your specific Assembly district, State Senate district, county supervisor race, or local school board better than your county registrar does. The page explicitly points you back to your registrar’s sample ballot for everything below the statewide level.
No editorial endorsements — just the official certified candidate list, the same eleven questions for every name, and traceable AI-researched answers when you ask.

The honest pitch

I keep coming back to the framing that crystallized for the “Making Sense of This World” reflection a few weeks ago: people who suspect, correctly, that the gap between what they can know and what they need to know has widened past what unaided attention can close. A California primary ballot is exactly that experience in miniature. Sixty Governor candidates, a dozen for Insurance Commissioner, a dozen No Party Preference contenders most newspapers won’t even name — and somehow you’re expected to make an informed choice by June 2.

The page doesn’t solve that. It does close the gap a little. Pick a candidate you’ve never heard of, ask question 3 (who funds them), ask question 10 (who benefits from their agenda), and you’ll know more in two minutes than two hours of Googling would have produced.

Try it: Go to election2026.net/california-primary-2026, scroll to a race you don’t know much about, and click one of the obscure candidates. Ask a couple of questions. Tell me whether it actually helps you decide — and what else you wish it did.

After June 2 the page gets replaced with a “how the primary went” recap, then rebuilt again for the November general election. Time-bound civic information, replaceable cleanly, sitting on top of a permanent library underneath.

— Peter