Gather and display data about early voting in Oklahoma

[mkchandler]

Description

The 2016 election has shown once again how long it can take to stand in line to vote early. This year seems to have made the issue worse because of more limited locations. It would be interesting to find data about how long people stood in lines at the various early voting locations.

With that data, we could put together an infographic style single page site with the info and a pre-built sample message to use to contact your representative to advocate for more early polling locations and times.

We could also promote absentee ballots as well, which you can sign up for online.

Project Leads

TBD

Discussion/Source

• Slack: #early-voting

Additional Details/Links

If you find any resources, share them in Slack or on this thread and I will add them here.

Who will use/benefit from this project?

Any resident could benefit from shorter lines, and making it easier to vote could help engage more people to vote.

Project Needs (dev/design/resources)

Right now we need people to research whether the data needed is available somewhere. Once we have that we can make a decision on what to do about it.

Status

Currently in a research phase.

[rogojs]

Slack Discussion Highlights

Research

• "...we should be able to get a list of registered voters (it is open data) as well as all current polling locations. That would allow us to determine the average distance to a polling location (among many other things)"
  • ACTION: Needs Input

Solutions

Technical

• Mobile App (Responsive|Native)
  • Possible one already exists
  • ACTION: Research availability of existing applications that provide analytics to potential voters about locations, so that they can make an informed decision when to go and vote
• Write our own
• Google maps provides travel information
• Possible value-add features
  • like reminders about upcoming votes you are eligible for
  • data/links to research the ballot
  • location tracking day-of so reminders can pop, e.g. when you are near an open early-voting location, Location tracking can also estimate how long you are at a polling station, to give a sense for how long it takes to vote - this could be aggregated and give decent estimate about lines and busy times, especially once history info is available"

Practical

• Increase the number of available voting (early & normal) locations. We recognize that early voting locations would likely only be applicable to the problem during national elections.
  • ACTION: Research what the process is to submit a proposal for increasing the # of EV (and voting locations in general). Perhaps understanding who would participate in that review process and what factors (cost justification, ROI from the States perspective, etc..) might be applicable

Resources

Applicable Oklahoma Statues
Civic Information API - Google

[mkchandler]

Cross posting the notes from our Nov. 28th hack night here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k_-0hCQrIxVMoKVW8j7PuI5KyzKrnp1lxxa4yUOU2zc/edit?usp=sharing

[kernjackson]

I realize the channel name is 'early-voting', but I want to propose an alternate solution. I see you (mkchandler) alluded to this in your initial post.

Pain Point

It's a pain to vote.

Possible Solutions

1. Improve early voting
2. Improve (regular) voting
3. Increase 'Mail in Voting'

Mail in Voting

I'm proposing that we consider option 3, increase 'Mail in Voting'. Washington State is a real life example of an all in approach. Alternatively a coordinated social media campaign might prove to be an easier and/or complementary approach.

Legal Approach

We investigate what it would take to default Oklahoma, or just Oklahoma County, to a mail in ballot system. Washington State automatically send out ballots to all of its registered voters, so there is a precedent. Their (FAQ)[https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx] has some great useful information about the program.

Social Approach

We take a cue from badvoter.org, but focus on positive social pressure. This could take the form of a facebook/twitter movment to encourage people to obtain absentee ballots. I suspect we have a large number of assets in our local design community that we can tap (e.g. DSN+DEV+OKC, Refresh OKC).