Power Ballot

Logo

Inspiration

The 2014 Power Ballot was a tool that helped citizens find detailed information about candidates and constitutional amendments for the 2014 election. It was built very simply by volunteers filling out a huge spreadsheet with 20+ fields which was used by python scripts to generated static html files for each ballot. This required a ton of work from Royce Jones, especially keeping the data up-to-date since it was such a manual process.

So we wanted to re-write the Power Ballot from the ground up to be more maintainable. With this new version authorized volunteers can use the web-site itself to directly edit the candidate information and links, which makes the overall project much more sustainable. We also wanted to learn new technologies and make the Power Ballot more usable.

What it does

The Power Ballot helps citizens find detailed information about candidates and constitutional amendments for the election so that they can be informed when they vote.

How I built it

We used React.js with node.js (express) on the backend

Challenges I ran into

We were initially using react-server on the backend but we found that it wasn't flexible enough for our needs so we had to rip it out of the project. Also it can sometimes be difficult to figure out how to query esri services.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Building something that is useful for people and our state as a whole. Every citizen over the age of 18 is part of the audience. That's a large potential impact.

What I learned

Audit the technologies that you want to use more heavily and ensure that they do everything that you want them to do.

What's next for Power Ballot

We're still cleaning up and finishing everything for this initial version. After the end of HACC we may still clean/pretty up the administrative pages, but those are low priority since they aren't end-user viewable.