How I Used My Startup Knowledge to Remap Texas Politics

The demographics don’t look good for Republicans in Texas. As the minority population grows and the population gets younger, the state is shifting into a battleground.

This is happening faster than Republicans expected. Ted Cruz is polling only low single digits ahead of democrat Beto O’Rourke. They are actually worried about this — and they should be.

And with 38 votes in the electoral college, Republicans know how important Texas is to their general strategy. Because of its importance, voter suppression (which usually profits Republicans) is alive and well in Texas:

• Texas has the lowest voter registration rate in the country.
• Texas (unlike most states in the country) doesn’t allow people to register to vote online.
• Volunteers who want to register voters need to go through a special process called deputization, and counties often make this difficult. Moreover, this needs to be repeated in every county.
• The Department of Justice has objected 207 times to proposed changes to voting in Texas. Last year a federal judge threw out the voter ID law in Texas for being discriminatory.

After Mapsense was acquired and I finished my time at Apple, I planned to start another company — but after reading about Tech For Campaigns (TFC), I decided to volunteer first and take some time to do some good. TFC introduced me to the problem (opportunity) of voter registration in Texas, and asked me to lead a team of fellow engineers and designers, and work with some Austin based hackers to build something. (Side note: I was duly impressed by the background and tech savvy the team). Our goal: see what we could do to make a difference in Texas by registering voters.

Step 1: The good thing about hacking voter registration is that all the data is public.

It can be a pain to get it all and clean it up (eg. some counties in Texas would like to mail you a CD of PDFs…) but with enough time the data is there.

To help register voters, what we really needed was a dataset of unregistered voters to target. Taking a dataset of all addresses (thanks OpenAddresses) and subtracting out our dataset of registered voters, left us with the potentially unregistered addresses.

Note that this description leaves out all the mess. Address conflation (i.e. matching addresses from disparate data sources) is not an easy problem — there was a whole team dedicated to this at Apple. But with some heuristics and normalization, we managed to get something acceptable.

Step 2: Before going any further, we decided to meet with some people who actually register voters in Texas.

We didn’t want to build something in a vacuum that nobody would actually use in the field. So, we set up meetings and had conversations with a variety of people and officials who work on voter registration in Texas. We had conversations about what’s happened in the past, our proposed tool, potential gotchas, the type of person who usually volunteers, and the underlying importance of voter registration.

We spoke with a variety of folks, from a community organizer working with minority laborers, the executive director of a major PAC, and even the official voter registrar and tax assessor of a county in Texas. Their passion was inspiring and far exceeded that of the average tech worker I speak to in the Bay.

Step 3: MapTheVote allows a volunteer to see a set of twenty unregistered addresses near them on a map.

Then they can work through the set, visiting an address to help register its occupants, store a simple result for what happened and and move on to the next house. Anybody who has used Google Maps or Yelp should be familiar with the interface and what to do.

The app is designed to be used by both a serious volunteer working for a full day or a casual user who just wants to contribute 20 minutes while walking her dog after work.

We’ve partnered with the Texas Democratic Party, and MapTheVote is being distributed to any interested 2018 campaign. We are also working with several of the organizations that I met with, getting this into the hands of volunteers around the state.

What we put together isn’t rocket science. We didn’t file any patents. In this case, simplicity was the solution. We cleaned up a bunch of messy data and built a UI that makes it easy for anybody to contribute. For a team of engineers and designers who build self-driving cars and work on trading algorithms, this work is fun. And it feels good.

Step 4: The registration deadline in Texas is October 9th.

We want to register as many people as possible before the deadline, so they can participate in the upcoming election.

• So, do you live in Texas? Visit MapTheVote and start registering your neighbors.
• Don’t live in Texas? Figure out who you know in Texas and tell them to visit MapTheVote.

If you want to use your tech skills for a good cause, consider volunteering at Tech For Campaigns. Trust me, if you work on SEO or sell mobile advertising for a living, this is going to make you feel good. Volunteering is not just for engineers: we need advertisers, marketers, copy writers, designers etc. Get involved!