# Ballotpedia **Ballotpedia** is a nonprofit online encyclopedia of American politics and elections, published by the Lucy Burns Institute and based in Middleton, Wisconsin. It maintains fifty-state survey pages on election administration — recount law, canvass and certification deadlines, ballot access, redistricting — that are among the most widely cited secondary sources on state election procedure, and that this vault's crosswalk maps reconcile against [[National Conference of State Legislatures]], [[Verified Voting]] and [[National Association of Secretaries of State]]. Its survey pages are useful and should be read with their construction in mind. The 2026-10-05 build of [[Recount Trigger Crosswalk]] documented two defects in its fifty-state recount page: its "automatic recount" column counts states where a close margin produces a **publicly funded recount on request** rather than a recount that happens with nobody acting, which is why its count of automatic-recount states is 28 against NCSL's 26 and MultiState's 20; and its cost and refund tables are internally inconsistent, with several states appearing simultaneously in the "state pays," "depends on circumstances" and "no refund" groups. Neither defect makes the underlying research wrong — both make its **counts** unusable without knowing which question each column asked. Expand with: its founding and funding history, the Lucy Burns Institute's donors and the recurring questions about its editorial independence, its staffing and editorial model, how its coverage scope has changed, and an assessment of where it is and is not reliable relative to primary statutory sources. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-05 ASCII map build for [[Recount Trigger Crosswalk]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[Recount Trigger Crosswalk]] · [[Post-Election Audit Crosswalk]] — the maps that reconcile its state surveys - [[National Conference of State Legislatures]] · [[Verified Voting]] · [[National Association of Secretaries of State]] · [[Brennan Center for Justice]] — the other trackers in the same space - [[Recount]] · [[Election Certification]] - [[Organizations Hub]]