The VIP in 2009

Welcome to another year of the Voting Information Project. Before we launch into our 2009 goals, we'd like to thank our partners for an excellent 2008 Election Season. I think some of these stats are really impressive:

• We had 10 states plus the county of LA produce VIP feeds, doubling our initial goal of 5 states. Thanks to all who helped out: Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia (though that one didn't quite have enough time to be public), and Los Angeles.

• Thanks to partners such as Google, Credo Mobile, Facebook, Election Protection, and Ben & Jerry's, we estimate that 7%-10% of the voting electorate used VIP or similar data that Google provided through their polling place locator API. The spike in queries for "where do I vote" queries is quite evident.

• VIP data helped new registrants find their polling place by providing street segment data instead of registered-address-only lookups, thus enabling potential voters at newly-registered addresses find their polling place. You'll notice that the two top states in polling place queries (MN and ID) are both Election Day Registration states, so this data is exactly what the users are clamoring for.

So what's on tap for 2009? New Jersey and Virginia both have gubernatorial races, and there are some major mayoral elections, including New York City. We aim to get feeds for those elections and as many local elections as possible.

We've received feedback on the spec from both contributors (e.g., states) and distributors (e.g., Google, Credo Mobile) and we're incorporating those suggestions into the next version of the spec, version 2.0. There aren't many changes, so if you set up a feed before, adopting version 2.0 should be no problem. Our goals for changes in 2.0 are:

• Making it easier for contributors to convert street segments to our spec

• Changing the format of election districts to coincide with states' databases. This change should make it easier to add ballot information.

• Separating portions of addresses for easier parsing by distributors.

• Making file sizes smaller.

We plan to unveil 2.0 next Tuesday.

In addition to all that, we're looking to expand our core partner outreach. The New Organizing Institute wants to help, as well as the folks who wrote the Election Markup Language (EML). As those relationships are finalized, we'll be sure to let you know on the blog. The more people involved the better, and we look forward to another successful election cycle in 2009!