Lessons Learned from Building Democracy’s Database
Cicero began as a small project to support our local nonprofit neighbor the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance in 2006. Since then we’ve grown and expanded our coverage significantly with the goal of becoming the global resource for elected official information and geographic data on elections and democracy. More than a decade later, we took a look back at some of the important lessons we’ve learned along the way.
Lesson #1: Political geographies are complicated
When we first set out to build Cicero, we knew there were two major types of data we needed to support an address to district matching service: legislative district boundary shapes, and elected official names and contact information. Our original scope was only on our local community in Philadelphia. As we chose to expand Cicero to other localities in the United States, we learned quickly that collecting political geographies in bulk was not going to be easy.
At the Federal level in the United States, it is fairly easy to obtain Congressional district boundaries. At the state level, it gets a little bit more complicated because GIS data lives in a variety of different state agencies depending on where you are (NSGIC has done significant work in this area to attempt to categorize all of this). Where it gets complicated is at the local level.
We can use an example to illustrate some typical problems we encounter.
These are the shapefiles of Pasco County, Florida voting precincts. They are colored by Board of County Commissioner district. If we wanted to add this County Commission to the Cicero database, we’d need to know the bounding lines for all 11 districts, in order to know which commissioner represented any given constituent.
If you look at the west side of the county, you’ll notice issues with the digitization of these district files. In reality there are no gaps in coverage, but the file is inaccurate. To make use of this properly in our database, our team has to locate supplementary documentation to get a more accurate reading on where exactly the district lines fall.
This is common across localities. They lack the technology, funding, and support, and don’t always have the need to maintain this data. Often a small town’s district map only exists in the form of a hand-drawn document. In those cases, we have to do significant work to digitize shapefiles so they can be utilized in Cicero.
Lesson #2: Election data changes frequently
To say this is a lesson we’ve learned is a bit of an understatement. It’s essential that we maintain up to date data on the elected officials we cover: nothing deters civic participation more than directing someone to the wrong elected official, and our goal is to never do that. But staying on top of a constantly changing dataset presents many challenges.
209 of the elected officials we cover left office unexpectedly in 2019 alone, and tracking those major changes is just a start. Subtler things, like an elected official’s office phone number changing, are just as important to track. We’ve put systems in place, such as a website monitoring service to help us catch updates like this to ensure our data is as accurate as possible.
Lesson #3: Your data is only as good as its source
When an election happens, we rely on official outlets to tell us what happened. We need to know election rules and calendars. We need published and updated election results. And we need to have a clear understanding of what happens when a race is too close to call or results in a tie. Government websites and local news outlets are our go-to’s.
So what happens if your “government website” is literally just an online PDF list of contact information? Or your official election results page doesn’t have clear documentation about the rules of a near tie? Or what if the local newspaper is the only source publishing election results for an entire county, and you hit the paywall before you can read them? Subscribing to hundreds or thousands of local newspapers is not the solution (read more about our thoughts on the problems with local news coverage here).
We’ve learned that it’s necessary to get creative in the face of data adversity (which admittedly sometimes just means manipulating a URL, or spreading the news out over the course of the week). In most cases, we usually start by calling or emailing legislatures. Rarely, when we get no response, we have submitted FOIA requests to obtain the data we need.
Lesson #4: Change won’t happen without this data
Countless nonprofits and advocacy organizations need this data — specifically at the local level — to do their jobs. From targeting legislators on Twitter to win more education funding in Pennsylvania, to organizing for cycling rights in London, to passing legislation in Arizona that saves countless animals every year, our customers have used Cicero to enact incredible change. Check out a few of our case studies to read some additional real life examples of successful advocacy efforts made possible by Cicero.
- Climate Solutions matches members with confidence
- Washington Environmental Council targets legislative districts for action
- Citizens’ Climate streamlines advocacy efforts
- Animal Defense League of Arizona “surgically” targets legislators
Lesson #5: We can’t do this alone
A decade later, our mission remains to be the global resource for elected official information and geographic data on elections and democracy. We know that’s a lofty statement, but we care deeply about continuing to expand our coverage, and making this data accessible to the public. In 2017, we partnered with BallotReady on the collection of city council district shapefiles across the United States. We’ve also had a long running partnership with TechSoup to help make our API credits affordable to nonprofits. We’re open to new partnerships with any organization working in a similar space, or with a shared mission. If that’s you, please get in touch. We’d love to work together.
This blog is adapted from a talk we gave at the TICTeC conference in March of 2020. Many special thanks to the mySociety team for inviting us to speak about Cicero’s journey.
