If you live outside of Minneapolis or St. Paul, you may find my posts about statewide races useful but I do not write about your City Council races, school board races, County Board races, etc., and I know it can be extremely hard to find good information on those races.
Good news, though — MPR News now has a fully statewide election guide that includes every race on the ballot. They contacted every candidate with three very basic questions (“Why are you running? What life or professional experiences led you to seek this position? What are the top issues you’re discussing with voters and why?”) When candidates did not respond, they assembled any information available on the candidates’ websites. If you click on candidate names, the guide will provide links to their website and social media links, and for many candidates that did not answer, there’s an “ask this candidate questions directly” link that directs to their campaign e-mail.
This is a tremendous resource and I’m so glad they’re doing this. Local races matter! (That’s why I write this guide!)
I also put together a guide for hunting down information on these races last year, which you can read here.
Will Tell Stories For Food 
This is a great resource, thank you! But I wish the information were more accessible. The software (Populist, apparently?) is a tendinitis trap. I haven’t found a usable workflow. For example, go from the landing page, Maplewood does not appear, despite having two city council seats on the ballot. Okay, jump to Ramsey County. Huzzah, that includes Maplewood municipal races as well as county and school board!
However. Each race is a box, with thumbnail photos of candidates across the top and buttons for The Three Questions below. Pick a race by scrolling, then pick a candidate by clicking. Click on a candidate and a new tab opens with not much additional information, just endorsements and links to campaign website and Facebook (in the one I’m looking at). Where are the three questions?
Try another route. If I enter my address and hit “Build a ballot,” it returns a promising-looking page with entries for individual races, but there’s nothing there for each race but office, candidate name, and party affiliation. Click on a candidate and get the same sparse-information tab as above.
Try again: from the Ramsey County page, for one of the races, click on one of the Questions. There! Each candidate’s answer, all lined up and legible, next to a name and thumbnail. So I’m happier, but not happy because (a) it took FAR TOO LONG* to find the magic path to the cheese through the maze and (b) now that I’m there, I still need to click three times per race (once per Q) to get the info. Why should it be this difficult?
I apologize if I’ve strayed into old-man-yells-at-cloud territory. This seems like a case of too-clever-by-half UI design that impedes the goal of getting info to motivated voters. I’ll whine to MPR next.
– Hal
* In fact I didn’t find it until composing this note, five days later.
PS: thank you, thank you, thank you for your election guides! In my circles we’ve taken to calling ballot research “Kritzering”.
I also found the UI frustrating. I relied heavily on right-clicking stuff to open it in a separate tab. (Which obviously is only an option on a computer, I can’t imagine using it on a phone.)