Google Elections Center state coverage

[Valerie]

Hello!
Is there a list anywhere of the states/locations for which Google
Elections Center has polling place information? Is there a certain
timeline for when coverage will spread to the entire country?

Thanks

[Daniel Berlin]

There isn't a list yet, but we cover all states but WA (which only has one county that votes) and OR (which doesn't have polling places).

The coverage in most states should be quite good (>85%).  The areas where we don't return polling places generally fall into two categories:

1. A few places where we haven't done a good enough job of street name normalization until too late in the pipeline (this is being fixed).  Because we won't display results where they match multiple street segments,  this causes some areas to not display polling locations.   An example of this is TN, where a lot of people are on highways with post directions, and we don't normalize the post directions until too late.

2. Areas where we detect there may be issues with the official data (As a concrete example, there are apartment buildings where the official voter files says there are people vote in different precincts, but the official polling locators/data don't give locations on an apartment level basis, and believe the entire apartment votes in one place).  Rather than risk telling the wrong people where to vote, we don't return results for these cases, even though the official locators will.  This affects a very small set of areas (<0.5%)

In general, if you have specific addresses you think should work but don't, i can tell you why it doesn't work.

[Valerie]

Thank you! That was very helpful
Also, was the application disabled following the election on November
5th, or is it still live? Is there a specific link where I can access
it?

Thanks again :D

[Daniel Berlin]

That *election* was disabled (The API returns an ELECTION_OVER result for that election id).  Handing a different valid election id to the API will give you a valid election.

It was disabled for a few reasons

1. The polling location data is going to slowly grow more and more invalid, and we don't wan't people thinking it is still valid.   We are not receiving updates for the moment on some of these datasets, and there will be redistricting.  The API is used for more than just the general election, and we don't want people accidentaly providing a polling locator for an invalid election.

2. Besides the polling locations, the other broader underlying datasets (street segments, etc) will change over time, and invariably change the data as it appears for that election.   Since this will *also* cause the election data to become invalid, we don't want to do this.

[Valerie Shen]

Hello Mr. Berlin,

Thank you for your help! I have a follow-up question on this issue. 

I understand that the application was disabled to prevent people from being confused by invalid data. I am interested in using the application to assist with my research. Specifically, I would be inputing voter addresses and seeing how far they were from their assigned polling location in November 2010. Is there any way I can still have access to the program/information for this purpose?

Also, you said earlier that Washington has only one county that votes. Does this mean everyone else uses mail in ballots?

Thanks!

Valerie

--
Valerie Shen

Harvard College Class of 2014

[Daniel Berlin]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Valerie Shen
<valer...@college.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Hello Mr. Berlin,
> Thank you for your help! I have a follow-up question on this issue.
> I understand that the application was disabled to prevent people from being
> confused by invalid data. I am interested in using the application to assist
> with my research. Specifically, I would be inputing voter addresses and
> seeing how far they were from their assigned polling location in November
> 2010. Is there any way I can still have access to the program/information
> for this purpose?

Errr, there are over 100 million street segments that map to polling locations.
This is a lot of places to query about.
Why are you trying to figure out the distance, exactly?
It varies from state to state based on population density and some
other factors.
If there is some aggregated statistic you want, i can simply calculate
it over the data a lot faster and a lot cheaper than letting you query
1 million times ;)

[Valerie Shen]

Hi! Thanks for your help!

What we really want is not aggregate data, because we need to correlate each individual's distance with that person's vote history. If you grant access to the program, we would be writing a program to input the addresses and calculate distances, and would not be typing them all in individually.

[Daniel Berlin]

I'm not sure how comfortable I am with having you query execute 100
million queries to find the polling places for every voter. This
would require disabling a whole bunch of protections on our side,
otherwise you would be limited to a rate that would take you
approximately 500 days to do the queries.
Further, trying to correlate this data with actual individuals and
their vote history makes me incredibly uncomfortable, and something we
take steps to avoid doing at all costs. I realize most voter files
are public, and already abused for all sorts of purposes, but this
changes nothing. The fact that you *can* do something doesn't mean you
*should*. We very deliberately make sure we are not given data that
tells us names of individuals/etc, just the address/etc data needed to
actually map them to a polling place.
I realize you may have noble aims (I assume you are trying to study
how distance to polling location affects voting rate or something
similar), but i'm not really willing to do this in general.
Let's take it offline, and maybe we can come up with some arrangement
that would ensure things like the data only being used for this
purpose and being destroyed when you are done.

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Valerie Shen

[Valerie Shen]

I understand your concern. Thank you for working with me thus far. Would you be willing to discuss this on the phone, or is there a private email I can talk to you at?

My email address is valer...@college.harvard.edu, and if you want, I can let you know my number so you can call whenever is most convenient for you.

Thanks so much,

Valerie