But there are some voters guides out there that can help you learn about the candidates. Note that some of the websites can be confusing to work through, so you might want to plan on taking a little time while going through the lists.

One of the longest-running guides in Texas is done by the League of Women Voters. See it at www.lwvtexas.org. It includes presidential, U.S. Senate and other statewide races from Texas Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals plus Railroad Commissioner all the way down to state board of education races.

To get to Bell County specific races, it takes some hunting and even then not all the races are covered by many of the sites. For example, https://truetexasproject.com/election2024/, which portrays itself as a conservative site, it has “TBD” (to be determined) as of Wednesday for all but one of the Bell County specific contests, and notes “We don’t have a resource here, so there are lots of gaps.”

You can get information on Bell County races from Telegram stories, which are under an Election Stories heading at www.tdtnews.com, and the candidates’ websites.

Among the most detailed voter guides found was https:/ivoter.com, which rates candidates from “strongly liberal” to “strongly conservative” but goes beyond that with a breakdown, as available, of scorecards, donations, endorsements and questions on various issues. The site is a part of the American Family Association’s political action effort, described on the site as “evaluating over 13,000 candidates, giving voters the confidence to vote wisely in accordance with their Judeo-Christian values.”

For people voting on particular issues, some groups provide lists of candidates who have supported them, such as https://www.texasallianceforlife.org/voter-guide/? for pro-life voters. It has an easy to use print feature so you can have a list of who you either support or oppose of the 10 races — statewide races, appeals court and a board of education race — that it has featured for Bell County voters.

A site for the National Rifle Association Political Victory fund (https://www.nrapvf.org/grades/texas/) gives grades based on either legislative votes or answers to questions about gun rights. These are sometimes hard to gauge based on some candidates not having had legislative experience. For example, an AQ rating designates “a pro-gun candidate whose rating is based solely on the candidate’s responses to the NRA-PVF Candidate Questionnaire and who does not have a voting record on Second Amendment issues,” the site said.

The NAACP of Texas does have a link to a collaborative effort with guides.vote to inform voters of political positions of candidates, but the site found through Google still lists the previous election candidates, not the current primaries.

The national NAACP in 2021 reminded an Atlanta branch president “The NAACP does not support or condone its units and affiliates endorsing political candidates.”

Just remember that sometimes politicians say what they think voters want to hear, so someone who might sound like they’re linked in with your views might be saying that to get elected.