Mapping the vote
Thousands of people move every day in America, which presents unique challenges for cities and counties before any election. Election agencies must ensure that voters are accurately assigned to districts, polling locations are properly sited and ballots are customized to reflect each special district.
Local governments work year-round on election-related tasks, such as determining precinct and district boundaries, and scouting polling locations. And, on election day, local officials have to withstand the intense scrutiny of their operations and the results. Because much of election management is tied to geography, many election agencies are turning to geographic information system (GIS) technology to manage and share data needed by local government staff, poll volunteers and voters.
Setting boundaries
Keeping track of voters moving into, out of and around cities and counties is one of the primary challenges for elections departments. “The voter landscape is constantly changing in any urban area. All kinds of things are happening, which means that voter registration activity collides with your address data, changing the way precinct and district boundaries need to be drawn,” says Kenneth Bennett, division manager of the Precincting, GIS and Election Tally Systems Division of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (RR/CC). “For the Registrar of Voters, boundary management is a continuous process of collecting new information and responding to it.”
Working for the most populous county in the country, Los Angeles County officials have their hands full planning elections. The county has more than 400 districts for nearly 10 million residents and may conduct more than 60 separate elections during a year. The county uses GIS to draw precincts; manage census, street and district data for election activities; and manage logistics for poll workers. “GIS technology serves an essential facet of our work — increasing effectiveness, improving reliability and boosting productivity,” Bennett says.
Los Angeles-area districts rely on county officials to draw accurate precinct boundaries and confirm that district boundaries match precincts. When precincts are consolidated, the RR/CC uses a GIS-based application to group precincts by district assignments. Then the application combines precincts within the same ballot groups (geographic areas that have the same district characteristics for the active districts in an election) into election precincts. The technology ensures that everyone within a particular election precinct votes on the same set of contests.
Election officials also try to ensure residents have few geographic barriers between their homes and their polling places. “We don’t want a six-lane freeway running through the middle of an election precinct, making it difficult for voters to reach their polling place,” Bennett says. “We have to consider any natural or man-made barrier that obstructs voter access. We cannot, for example, mix voters living inside and outside of a gated community when the polling place is inside the gates. GIS helps us solve these types of problems; while also helping us to ensure that precinct boundaries are accurate and voter counts are under any prescribed limits.”
The Maricopa County, Ariz., GIS group also continually removes splits in the precincts that arise from special district boundaries that overlap irregularly, such as fire, water and school districts. Splits are realigned along obvious existing boundaries, such as city limits or major streets. Reducing splits in a precinct reduces the possible combinations of districts that a resident will belong to and minimizes the number of customized ballots that must be created, which also minimizes election day confusion.
For the presidential preference election this month, the Maricopa County assistant election director and the jurisdictional manager/campaign finance manager used online and printed maps created with GIS to decide which precincts needed to be consolidated for the election. Additionally, GIS helps county officials place polling locations convenient to voters in each of the newly consolidated precincts.
Generating legal descriptions when precinct boundaries changed every two years used to be very time consuming for Maricopa County. Now, a GIS-based redistricting application automatically generates legal descriptions for boundaries in 15 minutes.
After the decennial census is taken, many counties will have to edit precinct data to reflect new district boundaries based on new demographics. After previous censuses, Los Angeles County used hard-copy printed maps and manually updated tabular records. “We will be using spatial analysis to validate precinct layer edits and to automatically assign street address ranges to the proper precincts after the edits are made,” Bennett says. “The GIS will make the process of reapportionment more accurate, less time-consuming and will help eliminate errors.”
Getting to the polls
In addition to the back-office tasks of precinct consolidation and redistricting, local officials are using GIS to help the public find election information easily. Los Angeles County RR/CC has created a GIS-powered Web site to help residents find their polling places by typing in their home addresses. And, on election day, polling inspectors use an automated GIS application to create and print precinct maps to direct voters who arrive at the wrong polling places to their correct polling locations.
Los Angeles County also uses a Web-based GIS application to scout new polling places. Poll recruitment staff are constantly looking for new polling places and used to do so with “windshield surveys,” otherwise known as “driving around.” With GIS, now they can inspect aerial imagery from their desktop computers and evaluate site characteristics, such as parking, handicap access and building size, before they drive out to visit them. RR/CC also uses the application to locate regional election distribution centers, election check-in centers where poll inspectors return voted ballots and training facilities for the 25,000 poll workers that participate in every election.
Maricopa County has streamlined its election-day tasks with GIS by creating maps of optimal routes for drivers delivering voting machines, ballots and other equipment to polling places. And, staff that monitor polling locations for problems on election day are armed with maps so employees can easily travel between voting sites.
Reporting results
On election nights during primary and general elections, Gary Bilotta, GIS manager for Maricopa County Elections, is at the local civic center using GIS to show precincts that have reported results. Bilotta projects a series of maps on a large screen to show the tallies by legislative, congressional and board of supervisor boundaries.
For its March 2007 general municipal elections, Carson, Calif., used GIS to improve public access to election results and reduced the number of phone calls from reporters and others asking for the data. Residents could see an online map of the counted votes and results for each precinct. Web site visitors could hover their mouse cursor over each precinct location to access information about the candidates.
For upcoming elections, Carson’s site will include charts to supplement the results. “The public expects the city to provide applications like this. They expect results fast,” says Barry Waite, Carson business development manager. “This is the people’s government, so the people have a right to know the results as soon as we know them.”
Washoe County, Nev., also uses GIS to deliver election results. In the 2006 general election, the county launched a Live Election Mapping Web site to provide near real-time election results to the public. Site visitors could search maps by voter turnout in each precinct, race, ballot question or geographic area. “When you saw the final results of some of the ballot questions on a map after the 2006 election, it was interesting,” says Kobe Harkins, a technology systems developer responsible for GIS support to the Registrar of Voter’s office. “There was a marijuana initiative, and when you looked at the maps, you could see spatially across the county how voters were thinking about that issue. That provides important information to politicians and government staff.”
As soon as the counts came in from poll sites, the Washoe County GIS staff posted the results online within about 10 seconds. Back-end improvements should make the site even more dynamic for the November elections. “We have received feedback from our registrar of voters Dan Burk and our county manager Katy Singlaub, and they were really excited about this as another vehicle for disseminating information to the public,” says Matthew Lawton, technology systems developer in the Washoe County GIS Division. “It also captures the excitement of the evening.”
Because election management requires ongoing geography-oriented problem solving, GIS is proving an effective and efficient way to coordinate all aspects of the voting process. “Local governments embrace GIS technology in land-use planning, parcel database maintenance, transportation analysis and infrastructure management,” Bennett says. “So, why not election support?”
Emily Vines is a writer for Redlands, Calif.-based ESRI. Keith Mann, writer for ESRI, contributed to this article.