The Voting Information Project: What Should Come Next?
The Voting Information Project is graduating.
Ten years ago, a group of technologists and policy wonks (including Andrew McLaughlin, Katie Jacobs Stanton, Ginny Hunt, Aaron Strauss, Michael Caudell-Feagan, and Doug Chapin) got together and started this geekiest of civic tech projects with no budget and very little understanding of the challenges involved. They were doing civic tech before it even had a name.
The Voting Information Project developed into a partnership between election officials, civil society and technology companies. This group worked together to publish XML feeds which contained the information voters would need to participate in the electoral process — information such as polling places, early vote locations and the candidates running on the ballot. Election officials published the data, civil society (mostly The Pew Charitable Trusts) paid for staff to process and run QA on the feeds, and technology companies (mostly Google) built products to surface the data to voters.
I inherited the project from the initial group, and I’ve helped lead it ever since. I’m not sure how many people understand how close we were to failure for the first six years. Through shear brute force and stubbornness, a small band of renegade data nerds broke rules, disobeyed orders and built on each success. As of today, the project has grown to 46 participating states. During the 2016 general election, the Google Civic Information API responded to 44M external queries with Voting Information Project data, representing a 54% growth over 2014. The data was served an additional 150M times to users through Google Search Voter Assistant features. By most measures, this project can claim to be among the most successful civic tech projects ever. There are still battles to be fought. Data quality and coverage can always be improved. But the vision as set out by that early group has been achieved.
Now it is time to figure out what comes next. Should the project continue to focus on data related to elections and improve on the current work? Should we expand the focus of the project to different types of civic data, like elected representatives? What about data related to civic services? What are the opportunities and threats to the work? What would you do if you were suddenly made CEO of the project?
An advisory board has come together to help Pew and Google think through next steps. If you care about the availability of high quality, reconciled, comprehensive civic data, and you have thoughts about the future of the Voting Information Project, I hope you’ll consider sending a quick note to us at future@votinginfoproject.org. (More details here)
I’m hesitant to list out everyone who deserves to be thanked in this celebratory note; there’s no doubt I will forget someone who is incredibly important. But we wouldn’t have made it without some special people, so thanks to those who made sure we survived the early days including: Tiana Epps-Johnson, Mike Hogan, Mindy Finn, Ethan Roeder, Patrick Ruffini, Jared Marcotte, Jordan Raynor, all the election officials who helped us figure out what we were doing (especially Sarah Whitt who took at least one 2AM frantic call about Wisconsin street segments) Matthew Morse, Donny Bridges, Whitney May, Daniel Berlin, Zachary Markovits, Seth Flaxman, Kathryn Peters, Maria Bianchi, Justin Moore, Chetan Sabnis, Noma Thayer, and all the many many others.
