Imagine. You are about to vote, someone approaches you and gives you a piece of their mind about whom they think you should vote for. Or, even more sordid…. some thugs walk up to you and “encourage” you to depart your polling station. Believe it or not, incidents like these do happen. That is why for several decades, Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based, non-partisan elections watchdog group has focused on monitoring Election Day activities in Philadelphia to ensure that all citizens are able to exercise their right to vote.

On Election Day, Committee of Seventy works with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to coordinate the Election Oversight Program, whereby election irregularities are monitored and registered through the combined efforts of volunteers and staff at a command center in parallel with teams of lawyers and volunteers deployed throughout the city. In the command center, team leaders field calls from voters, polling officials, as well as volunteers reporting election irregularities, then immediately coordinate with their teams at these locations to respond accordingly. During Philadelphia’s 2007 general election on November 6, Committee of Seventy turned to Azavea to help geographically record, map, and geo-analyze these incidents.

Maps showing concentration of election day incidents by ward.

The primary challenge of incorporating GIS into this endeavor was to create a system that would enable both quick recording of incidents and rapid map generation throughout the day. The catch was that a variety of maps was needed, including not just point maps showing individual incidents, but also aggregations by larger political boundaries indicating both relative numbers of incidents and proportions of different types of incidents.

Using ArcView 9.2, and taking advantage of ModelBuilder technology, Azavea volunteered to create a series of models that automatically performed the aggregations, some requiring as many as 35 tasks. These models were designed to take the incident point data and create choropleth maps at the ward, council district, and division levels with each map showing the aggregated number of incidents in each area, color-coded by types of incidents.

The incident maps proved helpful in several aspects of the Election Oversight Program. Committee of Seventy was able to identify problem trends citywide, ward-wide or district-wide and quickly respond to them. The information was compiled and continously analyzed so that they could stay on top of what was going on throughout Election Day.
With few hotly contested races in this election, Committee of Seventy wasn’t expecting a large number of incidents, but despite the relatively low turnout of an off-year election, 139 incidents were reported. Incidents ranged from the expected and relatively innocuous, such as voters unsure of where their polling places were, to troubling and bizarre, such as questionable behaviors by polling officials, rumors of thugs hired to intimidate voters and, the strangest of all: a local committeeman sitting in a van passing out alcohol and suspected by some to have a gun.

Though the mere report of an incident is no guarantee that it actually happened, or that it happened in quite the way described by the caller, these reports and their accompanying maps help to paint a picture of just what occurs on Election Day, and exactly what issues and geographic locations need the most attention from voting officials.

Jonathan David, Committee of Seventy’s Election Program Coordinator, noted that the maps were particularly important to “management staff and senior-level volunteers who needed to understand problematic trends – as they developed – so teams could respond quickly.” This trial run has been a success, leading Committee of Seventy and Azavea to use this experience to plan a more automated, web-based application that they hope to deploy for the 2008 presidential primaries and elections.

To read Committee of Seventy’s post election reports (including the election incident maps Azavea created) visit http://www.seventy.org/hot-topics/-2007-election-information/november-2007-post-election-report/.