One of the most important services West St. Paul Reader provides to the community is local election coverage. We cover the local races the larger media outlets ignore or at best barely cover. We make candidate Q&As, forums, voter guides, and more freely available to the community with no paywall.
So in the midst of our member drive, we wanted to explain why we do election coverage.
“Finding local candidates’ websites and social media pages to research their positions used to be so tedious. This voting guide is incredibly helpful.”
John Rapos
Your support makes that local election coverage possible: Join now!
“Super grateful for hyper-local articles like this. How often do people get insight on their local school board candidates like this? Spoiler: not often. Love that the citizens of West St Paul have so much info available to them. Good work, WSP Reader.”
Jade Pennig
Why We Cover Local Elections
Local elections—including City Council, school board, and county commissioner—are much more likely to have an impact on your day-to-day life than legislators in Washington, D.C., or even St. Paul. They determine things like your property taxes, snow removal, street repair, classroom teachers, and more.
Local elections have a major impact on your neighborhood.
Yet there’s little or no coverage of local elections. There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting down to research your ballot and finding nothing about local candidates. Maybe they have a website, but you have to parse their political speech. And nobody is fact-checking their claims. And some candidates don’t even bother with a website.
Democracy deserves better.
That’s why we cover local races, shining the light of transparency on political candidates so citizens can make their own choice.
“I am so grateful to read through the responses of the candidates, and so grateful that it’s so accessible to share and reference. So much of this information would have flown under the radar or simply not had a forum to exist in without this local news source.”
Andrea Buzzell
Our Local Election Coverage
Here’s a rundown of the kind of local election coverage we offer on West St. Paul Reader:
- Announced candidate filings and tracked who is running.
- Covered contested primaries.
- Asked candidate Q&As, focusing on City Council and school board, and in 2022 we expanded to include county and legislative races.
- Created printable voter’s guides.
- Created exhaustive voter’s guides that covered every local race on the ballot, linking to every relevant resource we could find.
- Shared candidate forums and frequently offered summaries of forums.
- Posted local election results.
Support Our Coverage
Our local election coverage is supported by neighbors like you. We couldn’t do it without the regular support of our members. Please consider becoming a member and supporting our efforts to cover local elections.
- Starts at just $3 per month.
- Pay annually and save 5%.
- Get a locally commissioned West St. Paul postcard, weekly member updates, and a discount to our store.
“Thank you for all the coverage! It really helped make learning about the candidates and voting easier.”
Roxanne Klemm
West St. Paul Reader 