Scraping the Internet for Information on Local Elections
Do you think voting is important, but find it hard to discover relevant information on local elections? If so, MyBallot is here to help.
Have you ever looked at your ballot and not known what some of the races were or who was running? Maybe you voted along party lines or picked the first name that sounded vaguely familiar? Did you ever wish you had more information on each candidate so you could make a well-informed vote?
This exact problem happens all across the United States during each election. Locally elected officials often have the most direct impact on our day-to-day lives, yet many people running for local office aren’t well known and it is often unclear how each candidate stands on important issues.
We created MyBallot to solve this exact problem.
MyBallot is a tool that allows users to get more information about local elections.
We scrape the Internet for information on candidates running for office, and run topic extraction and sentiment analysis machine learning algorithms to quantify where candidates stand on important topics.
MyBallot provides information on upcoming elections, politicians’ stances on issues, a political leanings quiz, county-level election turnout data, and more.
Sound interesting? Try it here: https://my-ballot.netlify.app!
View Upcoming Elections
Want to get information on an upcoming election?
MyBallot shows information on upcoming elections in your jurisdiction. Simply enter your street address on the home page and see a detailed breakdown of each race on your ballot.
Users can see who is running for each position, and can get detailed information on where they stand on important topics.
Behind the scenes, our web crawler scrapes the Internet for information on each candidate. We then run a machine-learning algorithm to extract topics relevant to each race. We also analyze the sentiment of each piece of text from a candidate to derive a quantitative estimate of their support for or against a given topic or policy.
Compare Candidates
Want to see how candidates compare to each other?
Users can compare candidates to see where each of them stand.
We have a set list of national topics that we rank all candidates on. We also run a machine learning algorithm to extract topics relevant to each local race. Candidates are ranked on those race-specific topics as well.
Take our Political Leanings Quiz
Don’t know where you stand relative to each candidate?
Users can also rank how they stand on each of the national topics and race-specific topics. Users can then see which candidates they most align with on issues important to them.
View Election Turnout Data
We provide an interactive map to show election turnout data in each county so you can see just how important your voice and your vote are. Data is based on election returns from the 2016 General Election.
Explore Local Office Descriptions
Don’t know what local elected positions like City Manager, School Board Member, or Water Commissioner do?
We provide helpful information and descriptions of common local offices. Users can explore and search to get more information on what each role entails.
Conclusion
At its heart, MyBallot seeks to empower voters with information so they can be more politically engaged in elections that matter most in their day-to-day lives.
MyBallot seeks to be an efficient and scalable platform that can increase voter turnout of local elections. Through increased engagement in the Democratic process, MyBallot hopes to make this country stronger and more voices heard.
About The Team
We’re the MyBallot team, a group of CS majors at Dartmouth College! We’re passionate about how technology can help make voting for local office less confusing, and wanted to create a centralized website to provide curious citizens critical voting information.
Try it out here: https://my-ballot.netlify.app!
