Voting Restrictions Guide

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  The landing page for the web app; allows you to navigate to learning more or searching for your state

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  Example of voting restriction output for a state

Inspiration

For years, many states have been increasing their voter restrictions. While these states usually claim that these measures increase election security, many groups have pointed out that they disproportionately affect people of color and people in poverty.

If you try to search online for voting restrictions in your state right now, you'll be greeted with long, confusing lists and large, overwhelming tables full of different restrictions and jargon. Who has the time to parse through all that?

What it does

Simply search for your state, and our web app will show you what voting restrictions your state has in place in a simple, digestible manner. Once you're aware of the restrictions that affect you, you can search online to find more information about them and how to prepare for them. Here's an example. Let's say you live in Georgia. Using our web app, you could find out that Georgia has voter ID requirements and long voting lines, among other restrictions. You could then take the necessary actions to obtain a voter ID and arrive at your voting booth early.

How we built it

Once you search for your state, the web app will use the BeautifulSoup Python module to read through MAP's voting restriction profile on that state. The web app will search for negative voting restrictions laws passed in that state, and return a categorized list of them to the front end. From there, the web app will display the restrictive laws.

The front end uses React and useSWR and the back end uses Flask.

Challenges we ran into

Formatting the data from the back end so that it could be mapped to bullet points was difficult to figure out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to parse tables and format data using BeautifulSoup, as it was a module we weren't very familiar with!

What we learned

We learned how to do web scraping!

What's next for Voting Restrictions Guide

In the future, the web app could simplify the voting process even more by also concentrating information about polling places, how to obtain a voter ID, etc.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• express.js
• flask
• javascript
• langchain
• openai
• python
• rag
• react