This is the simplest viable guidance for citizens to participate in the political system.
If you want to be a model citizen who is well-informed and highly engaged with politics, you can read the Civic Handbook and go from there. But you may not want to do that. You may not like politics. You may think that following politics is toxic or unhealthy for your personal life. You may just be too busy. Those are entirely understandable stances and I won't judge you for them. But voting makes a big impact, and only takes a bit of time every couple years, so you may as well at least do that, right?
This raises the question of how to vote if you don't have time to do all the traditional work of following the relevant policy debates and researching various candidates and ballot measures. Instead, you have to narrow your political concerns to a few key topics or just trust other people to be authorities on the subject.
You won't be the first to do this. Many citizens ultimately rely on trust networks. For generations, people have listened to their favored churches, labor unions, media outlets, commentators, politicians, or family members for political information and judgments. It's easy to wring hands at this practice for being tribalist, but it does lend simplicity and stability to a democratic system. It is a legitimate way of exercising your right to vote. And all you have to do to be a much-better-than-average low-info voter is trust the right people.
The solution is easy: trust the Effective Altruist community. In the same way that you would trust EAs to recommend a charity to support, you can trust us to recommend a candidate to vote for. It's that simple. Of course, if you haven't gotten acquainted with the EA movement yet, you should absolutely make time to read our general literature and follow some of our discussions.
Whenever a major election is approaching (including midterms and primaries), you will likely find some discussions and recommendations from other EAs. You can look for recommendations on the home page of my website, where I will post my own analyses and link to recommendations from other Effective Altruists on the noticeboard. You may be able to find other recommendations posted on EA social media.
If something on your ballot has not already been addressed by others in the EA community, you can just post a question on EA social media, message a particular person in the community who you trust, or visit a local group meeting. Or just make a decision based on whatever policy views you've already learned from us.
If you don't trust a political recommendation from EAs, feel free to read and interrogate us more deeply before making a final judgment. More generally, your reaction to my advice might be "Hey! I can't just trust whatever other EAs say! I should be informed and exercise my own judgment!" If so, I totally understand your stance and won't judge you for it. But it means you are putting yourself in the mindset of serious political engagement, so you should read through my Civic Handbook and Policy Platform to see the arguments for specific political stances which are common in the EA community.
Otherwise, if you only want to fulfill your minimum duties as a voter without a fuss, keep things simple and just listen to Effective Altruists.