County Chair Guide

Read this before your first sign-in. About ten minutes.

Local Democrats is a free app for voters. Someone in your county downloads it, enters their county and their districts, and from then on they see three things: what your county party is doing, the votes coming up before they happen, and who is on their ballot.

You are the person who fills that in for your county. There is a website — the chair portal — where you write posts, add votes and enter candidates. What you publish appears in the app for anyone who lives in your county, usually within a few seconds.

Nobody else writes for your county. If the app is empty in your county, that is because nothing has been posted yet.

Before you start

• An email address you check. Use your party email if you have one. Every sign-in sends a code to it, so it needs to be an inbox you can reach from wherever you work.
• A phone or computer with a browser. The portal works on both. Most chairs find posting easier on a laptop and checking easier on a phone.
• Ten minutes for the first sign-in. After that, most weeks are five.

You do not need the app itself to do your job, but install it anyway. Seeing what your voters see is the fastest way to know whether a post landed well.

Getting your login

1. You get an invitation email. It comes from Local Democrats and has a button that says Set your password. The link works for seven days. If it has expired, email support and we will send another.
2. You choose a password. At least ten characters. Use a password manager if you have one. This password is only for the chair portal.
3. You sign in. Enter your email and password, and we email you a six-digit code. Type the code and you are in. This happens every time you sign in, not just the first time.

The code has not arrived. Check the spam folder first — that is where it is nine times out of ten. Codes expire after fifteen minutes, so if you got distracted, request a new one rather than typing the old one. If two attempts produce nothing, email support and say which address you are using.

Why the extra code? You are publishing under the party's name to everyone in your county. A stolen password alone should not be enough to do that.

What you can and cannot see

You can publish for your county and nowhere else. The portal will not let you post to a neighbouring county or to the state feed. If you try, it tells you so.

You cannot see individual voters. Your dashboard shows how many people in your area have signed up. It does not show who they are, their email addresses, or a list you can export. This is deliberate. People give us their county and their districts on the understanding that it is used to decide what to show them, not to build a contact list. If someone asks you for the list, the honest answer is that it does not exist.

Other chairs cannot edit your county's content, and you cannot edit theirs. State party staff can post to the state feed, which every county sees.

The four things you keep current

Posts — your county's feed

The one you will use most. A post is a title, some text, and optionally a photo and a few links. The fields, in order:

• Where does this belong? Your county. Usually filled in already.
• Title. What a voter sees in the list. Make it specific. “Monthly committee meeting, Tuesday October 6” beats “Upcoming meeting.”
• Post. Plain text, and line breaks are kept. Write it the way you would write an email to a neighbour, not the way a press release sounds.
• Image. Optional. JPG, PNG or WebP.
• Links. Optional, each with a label and a URL. Where a sign-up form or a meeting agenda goes.
• Pin to the top of the feed. Use sparingly — one at a time. A registration deadline deserves it; a meeting reminder does not.

Then either Publish or Save as draft. A draft is invisible to voters, so write half of it now and finish it tomorrow if you like. A published post can be Unpublished later, which pulls it from the app without deleting it.

What to post, in rough order of usefulness to a voter:

1. Deadlines that affect them — registration, early voting dates, ballot requests
2. Things they can turn up to — meetings, canvasses, phone banks, fundraisers
3. Ways to help — precinct captain openings, volunteer sign-ups
4. What the committee decided and why

How often: two to four times a month is a healthy county feed. Weekly in the month before an election. A feed that goes quiet for a season tells voters the party did too.

Votes — decisions before they happen

A vote is a decision coming up at fiscal court, city council, the school board or the legislature that your voters have a stake in. The point of this section is timing: a vote already taken is news; a vote next Tuesday is something a voter can still show up to or call about. Enter them early.

The fields ask for a one-line summary for the list, the date of the vote, optionally where it happens, the details, and plainly what a yes vote means and what a no vote means. There is an optional party position — leave it blank and the entry stays purely informational, which is often the right call.

After the date passes, the app shows it under “Recently decided” for a month and then it clears itself. You do not have to tidy up.

Elections — the ballot

An election has a name (“2026 General Election”), a kind, an election day and optionally a registration deadline. Inside it you add races, and inside each race you add candidates.

Each race sits in a jurisdiction, which is how a voter in your county sees the state house race for their district and not the five others. Get the district right and the app does the rest.

For candidates: name, optional website, optional photo (head and shoulders works best), a short about in their own words, key issues and endorsements, both comma separated.

Accuracy matters more here than anywhere else in the software. A wrong meeting time is an inconvenience. A wrong candidate name or a missing race is the kind of mistake that ends up screenshotted. Check the filing list from the county clerk before you enter a ballot, and check it again after the filing deadline passes.

Settings — your password

Change your password here. If you also hold state-level access you will see the statewide links that power the app's Register to vote button; most county chairs will not.

House rules

• Voting mechanics come from the clerk, not from us. Dates, deadlines, polling places and ID requirements should be copied from the county clerk or the Secretary of State, and linked to where you can. If you are unsure of a date, leave it out rather than guessing — the app carries a line telling voters to confirm details with their county clerk, and it should stay true.
• Correct in the open. If you get something wrong, edit the post and say what changed at the bottom. Quietly deleting a post that people already read is how you lose the benefit of the doubt.
• No personal information about private people. No phone numbers, home addresses or photographs of people who have not agreed to it. Candidates and public officials acting in public are a different matter.
• Write for the person who is not already involved. Most people reading your feed are not on the committee and do not know what the acronyms mean. If a post would confuse your neighbour, rewrite it.
• Your county's tone is yours. There is no house style to match. Plain, specific and local beats polished.

A working rhythm

Every week, about five minutes. Open the portal. Is there anything coming up your voters should know about? Post it. If the last post is more than two weeks old, that is the signal to write something.

Every month, about twenty minutes. Check the votes list — anything coming up at fiscal court or council worth entering? Check whether anything in the elections section has changed.

In the eight weeks before an election. Weekly posts at minimum. Confirm the ballot against the clerk's filing list. Pin the registration deadline as it approaches, then swap the pin for early voting dates, then for election day itself.

When something goes wrong

Email support@demlocal.com and say what you were doing when it happened. Screenshots help more than descriptions. Worth emailing about:

• The sign-in code never arrives, twice in a row
• Something you published is not showing in the app after a few minutes
• You need to post for a county that is not yours, or a second chair added
• You spot content in your county that you did not write
• Anything that looks like someone else got into your account

If you think your account has been compromised, change your password first, then email — in that order.

Your first week

• Accept the invitation and set your password
• Sign in once and confirm the emailed code arrives
• Install the app and sign up as a voter in your own county, so you see what they see
• Write one post — the next thing on your county's calendar is fine
• Check it appears in the app
• Add one upcoming vote, if there is one
• Put a recurring ten minutes in your calendar, same time each week

Questions this guide did not answer: support@demlocal.com