Starting Monday, July 12, TennesseeTicket.com will feature voter guides for the upcoming August 5 elections (county general and state/federal primary). Early voting begins July 16, so completing them will be a race against time. Unlike those published by political interest groups, these pages will maintain as neutral a bearing as a human being can muster. The guides will be published separately by district, so that you won’t have to wade through lists of candidates in whom you have no direct interest. (Feel free to read as many as you like, though.)

But here’s the thing. You have to know in which districts you live. The easiest way to find this out would be to look at your voter registration card, if you knew where that was. A pretty handy alternative for Hamilton County residents would be to enter your street address in this form and then view, print, copy, or remember the results—but there is currently a problem with that site. (I’m placing a call to the Election Commission on Monday.) A really complicated way is to go to the county’s GIS mapping site, search for your address, then use the map layers to identify political boundaries. Ugh.

You can find your state and federal districts at VoteSmart. Enter your ZIP code at the top left. If, like mine, your ZIP code covers multiple districts, you can enter your ZIP+4 at the top right of the resulting page, and the results will narrow to just yours. Your congressional district and state legislative districts will be shown, but this won’t help you with city or county districts.

You can always ask me, and I will help. I have plenty of experience assisting others with finding districts and voting precincts.