From Left Space

A few years ago, a friend of mine in the 36th Legislative District here in Seattle, Washington started collecting election results from King County Elections (KCE). KCE provides canvass reports that are very easily converted to a database format that can be used on a website.

http://46dems.com/pco/precincthistory.php?pct=1281

Also a few years ago, another friend of mine in the 41st Legislative District developed a way to convert ESRI shapefiles into a javascript data format that can be used with Google Maps. He also posted instructions that would allow other districts to do the same.

http://46dems.com/pco/precinctmap.php?pct=1281

I took these two projects, and merged them into an online application that allows a person to research a precinct's history and see exactly where those voters are. It's a tool for our local Precinct Committee Officers to use to organize and for campaign targeting, and it's getting a lot of excitement. The webmaster for the King County Democrats' website took what I did and turned it into this:

http://www.kcdems.net/about/OrgInfo.aspx?ld=46&pct=2324

What we need now is access to the shapefiles from all 39 counties in the state, and we need to develop a way for us to input the election results from those other counties into the system precinct by precinct, race by race. Each county has different prices for the shapefile layers and there is no consistent format for the election history files. I believe that $5,000 would go a long way to help us collect this information into an online application that we could use across the state to win races at the local, state and national level. I intend to put the final product on the website of the Washington State Democratic Chairs Organization.

http://wa-democrats.org/blog/

Whether this wins or loses this infrastructure project, we will be moving forward, and we are willing to help develop tools like this for other states as well.

Chad,

We are currently in the process of reviewing the final short-list of applications for the BlogPac contest. Your project is on that list, and the judges would like to know some more about it. There are two questions in particular.

1. Would the money for this project go directly to the Washington or King County Democratic Party, directly to yourself, or to some other entity? Any clarification you can give on that matter would be of great use.

2. What is your estimated time frame for pushing this project beyond King County, and even beyond Washington State, and into a national project?I guess what I am asking is, how long are the various steps in this process once you and others have the available information to make it happen?

If ti is at all possible, please provide me with an answer to those questions on Sunday or, at the latest, on Monday morning.

Best, Chris Bowers

Holy smokes! We're on the short list!

Here are my proposed answers:

1. The money would go to the Washington State Democratic Chairs Organization, http://wa-demchairs.org , which is the organization of chairs and vice chairs in Washington State. The money would be used to purchase GIS shapefiles directly from the county GIS departments. These shapefiles go to our programmer in the 41st District, Roger Crew, who would convert them to .js data files that work with the script that he wrote to create the precinct maps. The resulting files will be used to create the precinct maps similar to what is currently on 46dems.com and kcdems.org.

2. We've already started pushing beyond King County. The maps for Snohomish County to the north and Pierce County to the south are operational, and we're working on getting them up and usable on both wa-demchairs.org and the county websites. Pierce county actually has them up and working. (Example in the 2nd Legislative District: http://piercecountydems.org/scripts/precinct_2.htm) The timeframe for the rest of the state depends on the projection that is being used by the GIS department. For those shapefiles that use the standard that the conversion script was designed for from King County, it shouldn't take more than a month to get the files ready and maps posted. Other types of projections are requiring the programmer to create a new conversion method, and we're looking at other options to speed things up. To go beyond Washington State is of course an option, and I've had inquiries from other states already. So far all of the people involved have been doing this on a volunteer basis. Getting the grant from BlogPac would enable us to move beyond that into a true service level business model, providing these maps and election info services to county parties based on need and the market for those services. That is certainly where we would like to go.

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Suzie, Roger and Rob. Please provide input to these answers. If you have any modifications, please send them to me ASAP. I will send them tomorrow, with or without modifications.

Chad

[edit] Results announced 8/15/07

Tried contacting the DNC to try and get in touch with the national chairs organization, got no response.

8/16/07

Hi Suzie,

Chris needs to know exactly where to send the check. The grant is $2,500. I'll get with you and Rob to determine how we should spend the money.

My first recommendation is that both Roger and Fred get $500 checks for the work that they have already done. Chris and I are going to be coming out with a fundraising letter that he's going to send out to his members and the BlogPac funders, so we will probably have more money coming in. But Roger and Fred deserve something for getting this far, and I to make sure that we are giving them just rewards. We do live in 21st century America, after all. Not everything can be volunteer.

I'll be stopping by the meeting on Sunday with my sons, but we can't stay for the entire thing. After Daniel and Shea head home, I'll start making telephone calls to the various county chairs asking for their help getting shapefiles for their counties. So far, emails don't seem to be getting me very far.

Chad

Expansion to Texas?

http://www.westaustindemocrats.org/precincts.aspx

I wanted to give you a quick update on the Maps and History project that Blogpac was kind enough to help fund back in September. We've been making quite a bit of progress, and I have some exciting additions to bring to your attention.

First on the maps. We now have the digital files for 20 out of the 39 counties in Washington State, and they are nearly all up and available on our website(s). Two of them we generated manually through a Google Maps interface that our maps programmer put together, so we don't have those shapefiles officially yet, but they're up nonetheless. Here's a link:

http://wa-demchairs.org/maps/precinctmap.php

You can also see some progress on getting the county map files up and operational for people to download and use on their own systems in Google Earth. Here's a link to the table under construction:

http://wa-demchairs.org/maps/index.php

Each of the .KMZ links are files ready to download. It's slow work because I'm putting them together manually for now. Eventually I'm hoping to be able to serve these from a Network Link, but the database is in a few scattered places right now.

The election history portion of the project is slower because of the different methods that county elections departments present their data, but we were recently able to import the Snohomish County data from the November, 2007 election. We're still building the interface to be able to show these results properly, but it's all there.