Over the past few years, Azavea has been involved with numerous elections-related projects, ranging from election-day incident reporting to consulting for candidates at every level of government. During the course of this work, we’ve occasionally needed to incorporate voter registration information or historical election results into our analysis. The public records request process can be arduous and cumbersome. And, all too often, even when a request is granted, we’ve found ourselves photocopying primary source records or holding a 100-page printout of the information we were seeking. Needless to say, we’ve been surprised that information so vital to the functioning of our democracy is rarely provided in a form that is easy for average citizens to access.

Map of the percent of the vote won by Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential general election, by precinct

Recently, as we began to develop a sample application to demonstrate the ways the Kaleidocade Indicators Framework (KIF) can be used to visualize and interpret local datasets, we realized that we had the opportunity to illustrate how historical elections data can be made available to the public in a user-friendly web interface. To this end, we assembled the results of elections held in Philadelphia for all state and national offices from 1992 to 2008, along with the results of the 2007 elections for city offices — all told, more than 4 million records.

We’re excited to announce that the election results that we acquired are now available in the online KIF Local Sample at both the precinct and the ward levels. Users can generate a simple report based on an address or can assemble a fine-tuned collection of indicators by selecting particular candidates and geographies. Once an indicator collection is complete, KIF provides many options for interpreting the data. Visualizing election results on a map allows users to detect spatial patterns in candidate performance. Users can customize the data display by changing the class break schemes or color ramps, and by overlaying selected features and boundaries. The data can also be examined in a table (including trendlines of candidate performance over time), viewed as statistical summaries like distribution histograms, or compared through ranked lists of results.

Increasingly, from the federal to the local level, transparency and open government are becoming mandates. Our local sample serves as a prime example of how KIF would make it simple for elections commissions to share data with the public. Offering historical election data through a web application also has the advantage of making public records requests a self-serve process that can reduce the burden on elections commissions’ personnel. And while historical data is important, a tool like KIF can also be adapted to near real-time election results reporting. Rather than releasing text summaries of election results after the fact, city elections officials could enter precinct results into KIF as they are reported, making the web interface a valuable breaking-news and public information tool.

In the meantime, the KIF team plans to continue adding Philadelphia election results to the local sample, including the Philadelphia mayoral and city council races from 2003 and 2005. Check out this powerful local resource and spread the word! If you’re interested in politics and open government, you might also want to take a look at Cicero Live (described below) and the Elections and Advocacy sample application of DecisionTree, Azavea’s web-based geographic decision-making tools, with which you can simulate a canvassing or GOTV campaign.