Voting Info Project Blog

Lost Voters, Lost Votes

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:52:00 -0400

The New Organizing Institute (NOI) a project partner and key member of the Voting Information Project team -- has recently released an important white paper analyzing the shamefully high number of voters who don't vote solely because they cannot find their polling place location. According to NOI:

In 2008, an estimated 1.9 million voters did not cast a ballot for one simple and solvable reason: they did not know where to go. Marginalized voters including racial and ethnic minorities and the young were disproportionately likely to have difficulty finding their polling place.

NOI goes on to report that because of redistricting following the 2010 Census, the 2012 presidential election could make finding polling places even more difficult for voters:

Precinct boundaries across the nation will be redrawn and polling locations will be reassigned, consolidated, or eliminated. A voter who previously voted at the church a few blocks east of their house now will vote at the school a few blocks north. Tens of millions of such voters in 2012 will be asked to cast their ballots at a changed polling location.

News reports from 2002 reported that up to 30% of voters or more had their polling location changed after the federal census. If this holds true following the 2010 census then in excess of 29 million established voters could have their polling location changed in 2012. As NOI points out in their report, a national online polling place look-up tool is a major part of the solution. That's exactly what we are working to facilitate here at the Voting Information Project. Working with our VIP partner states, we are able to build uniform feeds of official polling place data that can be distributed to anyone to build third-party apps and gadgets, bringing accurate polling place information to more voters where they are online. NOI goes on to say:

Without a comprehensive and multi-modal approach to providing accurate polling place information to all eligible voters in America, 2010 and 2012 could continue to be case studies in too many votes lost rather than models of progress toward all votes counted.

At VIP, we are working to make sure that doesn't happen. We have embedded the full white-paper below for your reading and sharing pleasure: NOI - Lost Voters Lost Votes

How VIP States Can Use FourSquare Cartography for Voter Education

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:54:00 -0400

This week, the Seminole County Supervisor of Elections office in Florida announced that they are the first county in the country to completely map out each one of the county's polling places on FourSquare the fast-growing location-based social network. The social online game awards points and badges to users who check-in to various locations while exploring their cities. If you are unfamiliar with FourSquare, here's a link to a short video for your edification. After VIP team member Jordan Raynor originally tweeted this idea a few weeks ago, Seminole County's Supervisor of Elections, Michael Ertel, contacted Raynor to see if his firm would be willing to take on this project for Seminole County. After a few short weeks, Ertel and his talented team have successfully completed the project, making Seminole County the first county to map out every polling place location on FourSquare, complete with early voting and Election Day hours of operation. (Mad props to the entire staff!) Someday soon, voters will show up to their offices with "I Voted" lapel stickers and their friends and colleagues will have already seen their "I Voted" FourSquare badge on Facebook or Twitter. Here at VIP headquarters, we're super excited to see new ways voting information is being distributed to voters. We want to help other election officials interested in pushing polling place information to different online tools by putting the data into a format that allows services like FourSquare to engage their audience around civic participation in unique ways. Using VIP data, election jurisdictions can take the Seminole County FourSquare model and apply it to their own elections, effectively distributing accurate polling place data directly to thousands of voters' cell phones on one of their favorite social networks. VIP is joining the petition started by Jordan Raynor asking FourSquare to create an "I Voted" badge. You can help us by signing this petition to FourSquare. We love the idea of a virtual "I Voted" sticker for all the internet to see. Despite the fun, it's not all games. This FourSquare project is bigger than points or badges. It proves how an accurate source of voting information in a standard format is vital to ensure that we harness the creativity of the Internet and help government bring data directly to voters where they are online.

You Really Love Us, You Really Do!

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:55:00 -0400

We got a lot of great attention on Friday and over the weekend from the blogosphere. Joe Trippi, Why Tuesday, Tech President, and Future Majority, among others, blogged about our efforts. We really appreciate the support we’re receiving from all of you, and we’re looking forward to your help publicizing our new gadget once we’re finished creating it.

Thanks for getting the word out friends.

For more updates about our work, follow the Voting Information Project on twitter.

The Voting Information Project at the Great American Hackathon

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:17:00 -0400

This weekend, Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation's open source development community, held the first "Great American Hackathon." Participants included nearly 200 coders from across the country. The event was made up of over 20 gatherings and people cooperated online via twitter and chatrooms.

Sunlight Labs graciously highlighted VIP as a source of data the attendees could work on. Aaron Strauss (official VIP title, Technical Advisor Extraordinaire) wrangled a couple of the software engineers attending the D.C. gathering, including Sumer Nemeth from Imagine Election, and they started work on what we think will be a really great project.

You all know by now about our popular election information and polling place look-up gadget. This new collaboration of coders is creating the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB) gadget. We want to make it easier for military and overseas voters to cast ballots from afar -- and our new gadget will help. A voter living on a military base in Afghanistan, for instance, would enter the U.S. address at which they were registered and our FWAB gadget would generate a PDF that the voter could use to select their preferred candidates, print out, and mail in. Like the initial gadget, this new FWAB project is open source.

There's only a modest amount of code written at the moment, but we'll be adding more over the winter. We hope to have something to debut by the end of January.

As we mentioned in our last post, the Virginia Voting Information Project Google Gadget was taken down right after the election. However, Google has left up the API for open development. You can access it here. If you are a creative developer with a great idea for using our data, have at it! We can’t wait to see what applications will go viral in 2010 and beyond.

Again, a big thank you to Sunlight, especially Clay Johnson, for asking us to participate in the Hackathon. We look forward to the next one.

The Wonder That Was The 2009 VIP Gadget

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:38:00 -0400

The story so far... As you already know, our good friends Paul Stenbjorn and Bihvani Gollu along with the rest of the team at the Virginia Board of Elections put together an XML feed of voting information for Virginia for their statewide election this Fall. Our partner Google, created an awesome, embeddable gadget. Essentially, any website could easily copy code from Google and drop a polling place look-up tool into their website for their visitors to use. In addition to telling a user where their polling place was and the hours it was open, it also provided driving directions and listed the candidates appearing on the user's ballot. The websites choosing to use the Google gadget represented a rainbow of colors across the political spectrum. We had conservative campaigns, progressive campaigns, newspapers, unions, issue campaigns and the biggest feather in our cap, the Virginia State Board of Elections used our gadget on their front page. (VIP takes a bow). You can see a complete list of sites using the VIP gadget here. Because we didn't want to confuse voters we took the gadget down the moment the polls closed. (Google has generously left the API open, and you can access it here.) If you missed seeing the wonder that was the 2009 VIP gadget in person, we have recreated the experience for you now. The gadget could be embedded in any website here's how it looked on the Virginia State Board of Elections website. A voter could enter an address into the search box ... And the gadget would return a map of the address and the polling location for that address: And by clicking "View Full Details" a user could see who was listed on their ballot: As we move into the 2010 cycle, we're looking forward to even more exciting tools developers will create that help distribute voting information. If you're interested in getting involved, feel free to contact us at info@votinginfoproject.org.

The Great American Hackathon

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:52:00 -0400

The Voting Information Project is at the Great American Hackathon, a gathering of coders interested in government data, today and tomorrow. We're looking for developers to take the API (which takes an address and outputs JSON data on where to vote and who is on the ballot) and create either a mobile app or a Federal Write in Absentee Ballot (FWAB) front-end. You can join us physically, on chat, twitter, or email us to get involved!

Happy Election Day!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:03:00 -0400

Happy Election Day everyone! Election Day is our favorite day here at the Voting Information Project, as it's the day when our information is used to help democracy function. Please do your part by voting, and if you live in Virginia, we've got a handy gadget for you so you can know where to vote and what's on your ballot. Speaking of Virginia, the Washington Post wrote an editorial this weekend lambasting the State Board of Elections' lack of effort in disseminating ballot information. The editorial certainly seems as it were written a month ago and only published on Saturday, because it fails to note that 10 days ago Board prominently placed the VIP gadget on its web site. Paul Stenbjorn of the Board officially responded in a letter to the editor today. But the Post's Editorial accuracy isn't our focus. Instead, we would like to humbly suggest that if the Washington Post wants to make official Virginia ballot information accessible to voters, then they should install the same gadget on washingtonpost.com! Numerous candidates and non-profits have joined the Board and installed the gadget (see below), so what is the Post waiting for? Right now, the Post only has a small link to Virginia's older, polling place-only web form--the same site that they criticize for failing to reveal ballot information. In future elections, we hope that editorials like these are unnecessary. Everyone--Board of Elections, Candidates, Newspapers, you--can share voting information on your web site or facebook page. These partners have displayed the gadget on their website (ordered by date of adoption).

Announcing the 2009 Virginia Voting Information Project Google Gadget

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:44:00 -0400

We've been planning this for ages, so we're excited to finally announce the launch of the 2009 Virginia Voting Information Project Google gadget. As part of the VIP team, I'm not an unbiased source, but I think it's pretty freaking fantastic. As we've said from the beginning, our goal is to help Election officials provide voters the information they need to participate effectively in elections. Our tool does that by providing a way for websites to easily make available to Virginia voters their polling place location. Starting later this week, it will also provide a list of candidates that will be on a voter's ballot. Here's how it works. This is what the VIP Google gadget looks like after it's embedded. Any webpage owner (you!!), can go here, and get the code to embed the gadget. Need extra help with this step? Try here. Once the gadget is embedded, any Virginia resident accessing your website will be able to find their polling location, obtain directions to the polls, and, starting later this week, view the list of candidates appearing on the ballot. The gadget uses information directly from the Virginia State Board of Elections, so it will be providing Virginians the official version of their polling place information at all times. We're super excited about the project, and hopefully this will be a big help to campaigns, schools, newspapers, and other organizations who want to help get Virginia voters the information they need to vote. If you have any questions about the gadget, or if you have feedback for us, we'd love to hear from you. If you want to know more about the project, I suggest reading this. And while we're high-fiving ourselves at VIP headquarters, we'd be remiss if we didn't thank the Virginia Board of Elections. Throughout the project, they've been amazingly helpful, and we love their approach to ensuring election information is easily distributed by lots of different channels. We're especially thankful to Paul Stenbjorn and Bhavani Gollu who worked tirelessly to help us put together the VIP feed that powers the gadget. And of course, our partners at Google made a herculean effort to get the gadget ready for launch. Thanks to the team, Ginny Hunt, Dan Berlin, and Mike Geary. A quick note: the tool is currently suffering from some errors of omission. Translated from tech speak that means there are some voters for which the gadget won't return a polling place location. We use the same data that the Virginia's Board of Election uses, but some addresses get confused in the conversion to Google-standardized addresses. For instance, if a voter lives in Henrico County for electoral purposes, but has a Richmond postal address, then the tool is unable to return a polling place location. Also, anyone with an address ending in Trail or Square is running into problems. We're aware of these issues and we're working to overcome them.

Transparency is a Bipartisan Issue

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:49:00 -0400

Here at the Voting Information Project, we count ourselves as part of a network of innovative organizations working to help the government distribute information effectively to America. Nicknamed the "transparency movement", these advocates work in all areas of government, executive, legislative and judiciary, federal, state and local, to ensure that people have the information they need to be engaged, informed citizens. The L.A. Times today has an article, "These Crusaders Bring Transparency To Government" profiling some of our favorite efforts including RECAP, the Sunlight Foundation, and public.resource.org. As the article notes, one of the coolest things about the transparency movement is its bipartisan nature. All sides can agree that giving people access to information produces better outcomes. VIP benefits from the support of both Republican and Democratic leadership. Last election cycle, we had VIP feeds from states with both Democratic and Republican Secretaries of State, and we're looking forward to developing more relationships on both sides of the political aisle in the future. Whatever your political stripe, if you'd like to get involved with the Voting Information Project, you can join the discussion in our google group here.

Web 2.0 Coming to a Government Near You

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:01:00 -0400

Recently this article came across my desk via @sunlightnetwork on twitter. I think the key take-home point is this:

A survey conducted last month of local government Web 2.0 use and implementation revealed that 75 percent of about 50 responding cities and counties are using, or are beginning to use, RSS feeds to provide news and updates to citizens, and 100 percent of respondents are using wikis internally.

More and more governments are realizing that they can govern more effectively if they utilize online technology to communicate with constituents. The Voting Information Project would help state and local governments communicate with voters by providing answers to the questions most asked by voters: Am I registered? Where do I vote? What's on the ballot? VIP provides users with an appropriate link to answer the first question, and displays official data to answer the second question and third questions.

Helping Election Officials Connect Voters with the Information They Need

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:55:00 -0400

One of the primary benefits of the Voting Information Project (VIP) is that it can make official election information available to voters via information providers like campaigns, voter protection hotlines, Internet search engines, universities and other civic groups so they can help shoulder the burden of answering voters' questions about where to vote. This is especially important when polling place locations change between one election and the next. Maryland held local elections this week, and in some locations, the municipal boards of elections needed to change some polling locations. In Fredrick, Maryland, voters normally use, among other locations, schools as polling places. However, this year, because school was in session during the election, the school board excluded the city from using school property for voting. The city's efforts to inform voters about the changes included maps posted at public facilities, advertisements in local newspapers, public service announcements on local radio and notification on public access channels, but no efforts were made to reach out to voters via the Internet or mobile technology. In the Annapolis, Maryland election, word about polling place changes didn't reach all voters and confusion reigned on election day:

"The fact that a lot of the polling places are changed is definitely confusing people," mayoral candidate Josh Cohen said this morning.

Despite election officials' best efforts, not all voters learn about polling place changes through official communications from their local boards of elections. Other civic organizations can step in and help advertise changes, and voters can use Internet search engines to find out about changes, but only if these information providers have a way of obtaining official polling place data in an easy and cheap way. VIP ensures that anyone interested in helping voters get to the polls has the up-to-date, official version of the data. By adopting VIP, a State or locality can efficiently issue accurate information to interested information providers, who can then help communicate any changes to voters. For more information, contact us at info@votinginforproject.org.

Shape Files

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:57:00 -0400

The VIP format defines precincts by street segments. However, often I talk with people who want to use shapefiles to view precincts. They run into the same basic challenge that VIP deals with: some states publish the information, some states don't. During redistricting, the census publishes nationwide precinct shapefile -- unfortunately, the last redistricting was in 2000. If you don't want to wait until the 2010 data is published, I've started a Google Doc with a list of official precinct shape files by state. If you want to contribute to this list, let us know For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, shapefiles let you do things like this:

Introducing VIP Version 2.0

Tue, 19 May 2009 23:41:00 -0400

Even though 2008 was extremely sucessful, we're always looking for new ways to improve. To that end, we've proposed some changes in VIP's format, nearly all of which are based on your suggestions. You can view the new format here. Comments are extremely welcome by emailing me or joining one of the three groups listed on this page. Major changes include:

Streamlining street segments into one object. This change should dramatically reduce the length of feeds.
Recasting Tabulation Areas as Electoral Districts and having precincts link to Electoral Districts rather than the other way around. This change helps states include candidate information.
Common address types
Information on registration deadlines, absentee ballot request deadlines, and Election Day registration.

Overall, if you produced a feed in 2008, your code will need some tweaking, but not too much. And the resulting file will be smaller.

The VIP in 2009

Fri, 15 May 2009 14:18:00 -0400

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!