Waterloo Region Votes
Information About the 2026 Municipal Election
If you are feeling overwhelmed by this election, you are not alone. Fortunately, there are ways to break down the problem and make it more manageable.
If you would like some inspiration for why you should bother voting at all, see the Information for Voters page.
The first step is to figure out which candidates you are eligible to vote for.
Make sure you are eligible to vote, and that you are on the voters list. See the How Do I Register to Vote? section in the Information for Voters page.
Find out what township or city ward you are eligible to vote in. You can use the map on the front page of this site for that, or check with your municipality. Once you know which ward you can vote in, you will also know which school board and regional candidates are running in your area.
Find out which school board you are eligible to vote for. See the School Board Info page for instructions on how to do this. Once you know your school board you can ignore candidates for the other three school boards.
Visit the page on our website corresponding to your township or city ward. This will list all the candidates for all positions that we know about. This page also links to a candidate worksheet you can use for taking notes.
You can print the worksheet or take notes in your web browser as you do your research.
Once you know the candidates you can vote for, the next task is to narrow your search.
Start by picking a position (mayor, school board trustee, etc) to focus on first. The important thing is to choose something and not get paralysed by choice. Some criteria you might use to figure out where to focus might be:
Now that you have a position to focus on, you can research the candidates running for that position. To do so effectively, see the section below.
Your first step should be to eliminate candidates you obviously will not vote for. Then you can research the remaining candidates.
If you are still unable to decide, choose another position to research and sleep on this one. When you are stuck, taking a break and letting your subconscious tackle the problem can be very helpful.
Decide another position to research, and repeat the process!
There are several strategies people can use to pick candidates. Here are a few of them:
This strategy for selecting candidates is intended to narrow down your choices quickly, so that you can focus on the candidates that interest you the most. In our experience it is fairly effective.
If the election is fast approaching and you don’t have much time left, life gets harder. However, you can get a quicker overview for your research with the following workflow:
Looking through individual candidate websites and social media can be useful but is often fairly time consuming. Do this when you are trying to decide between a couple of candidates.
Torstar and Vox Pop Labs have released Vote Compass to help voters quickly find the candidates that align most closely with their political values. Vote Compass is a great tool and very helpful for determining which candidates come closest to matching your political views, but it has a number of limitations:
In 2026, Vote Compass only covered the 50 most populous cities in Ontario. That includes the cities in Waterloo Region, but not the townships.
Vote Compass only covers regional and municipal candidates. It does not help you decide between school board candidates.
Vote Compass helps you determine the candidates that come closest to matching your political views, but it does not assess how qualified and experienced the candidates are. There can be candidates who match your views closely but are still poor choices because they have not developed the skills necessary to do a good job.
Similarly, Vote Compass does not assess how serious candidates are about winning their positions. Some candidates run as a form of awareness raising or political protest. Some candidates put their names on the ballot but do not campaign seriously and do not intend to win. These candidates may match your political views closely, but that does not mean you should vote for them.
Unfortunately, in our current voting system vote-splitting is a real concern: candidates who are closely aligned politically can split the vote between them, allowing another candidate who does not share those values to win instead. Vote Compass does not determine who is a serious contender to win their position. If a candidate matches you very closely but is unlikely to win, it might be smarter to vote for a candidate that is a little less aligned but is more likely to win.
Some candidates may not have registered with Vote Compass. This is partially their fault (all eligible candidates were eligible to participate) but there may be candidates who did not register, but who align closely with your values.
The questions asked in the Vote Compass survey assume a particular framing that may not map to your beliefs very well.
If you do use Vote Compass, be sure to look at candidate responses to each question. Some candidates wrote text explanations for their positions.
We can’t stop you from using AI to make your decisions, but there are pitfalls. Certainly an AI can tell you who to vote for in minutes, as opposed to the hours it takes to do your own research.
We have done some research on using AI to recommend candidates, and have identified some dangers to consider:
AIs work best when they have lots of training data, and there is not that much training data available about local municipal elections (even for more prominent roles like mayors). In our testing we found AIs made bad factual errors, including hallucinating the name of a candidate that did not exist, and missing candidates that were running for a position.
For some reason it seems that AIs are not good at reading PDFs or watching videos. So they won’t necessarily do a good job of extracting information from debate recordings or questionnaires.
We have found that AIs have recommended different candidates for the same positions when run multiple times with similar prompts.
As of this writing (April 2026) it is safe to say that if you use an AI to recommend candidates then you should double-check its work.
An incumbent is a sitting politician who is running for re-election. In municipal elections incumbents have a strong re-election advantage, partially because they tend to have better name recognition than other candidates.
Voting for an incumbent can be a good idea if you think the incumbent has been effective and responsive to your needs. Certainly incumbents tend to be better informed about municipal issues and procedures than other candidates.
However, your job as a voter is to vote for the best candidate, and sometimes newer candidates can represent you better than the existing seat holder.
Candidates spend a lot of time and energy canvassing (visiting voters door-to-door) and putting up lawn signs. These are signals that a candidate is well-funded, and that they are organized enough to run a thorough campaign.
However, just because candidates shake your hand does not mean you are obligated to vote for them. Shaking hands is part of the job politicians have to do, but they need other skills too.
Similarly, some candidates run campaign ads. This shows that the candidates have raised money but does not mean you are obligated to vote for them.
When evaluating published media, you can ask the following questions:
When evaluating contentious issues, you can ask the following questions:
On this website we frequently recommend people watch debates and all-candidates meetings? Why?
In our experience, debates and all-candidate meetings are the most effective and quickest way to narrow down candidates, because these events compare candidates side by side, responding to the same set of questions.
On the surface this seems slow and ineffective (who has time to watch boring debate videos??) but it is much faster and often more effective to judge candidates using side by side comparisons than by reading text or watching campaign videos.
Even listening to a few rounds of questions will narrow the field quickly. You can then research the candidates that appealed to you more deeply.
Having said this, there are some dangers to watch out for:
We link to some local media hubs on the Information for Voters page.