As I wrote on Friday, the third Dev House Boston happened this Sunday, and I was in attendance. Although I was only able to stay for the morning, I had a great time, met some fascinating Boston-area technologists, and got started on a fascinating little project which, I hope, will prove useful for at least a few people.
About an hour into the event, I struck up a conversation with Matt Gross, who works with uLocate, one of the event sponsors. Gross is an expert in mobile technology, and he's been kicking around an idea to help voters find information about the candidates on the ballot when they are in the voting booth, or en route.
After massaging the idea a bit more, we came up with two variations on that theme. One variation allows a voter to look up his or her polling place by phone. The second allows a voter to interactively pull up a list of endorsements and brief biographies for each of the candidates on the ballot. Those endorsements could come from from interest groups the voter trusts, local party organizations, or anyone else who cares to make an endorsement. If the application were properly integrated with Facebook or another social networking site, the application could provide the voter with endorsements made by his or her friends.
To begin, we are tackling the first problem - helping voters find their polling place. The idea, essentially, is to ask voters to enter their cell phone numbers on the voter registration form. The voter's cell phone number will, therefore, end up on the Secretary of State's file of registered voters, along with the state-determined polling place. When a text message is received, the polling place lookup application can look through the voterfile for the cell phone number used to send the text message, and return the corresponding polling place.
We've taken some baby steps along these lines, by signing up for a MsgMe account and looking around for sample data. Right now, all I have is a two-year-old copy of the voterfile for Cambridge, Massachusetts (where I live), and a list of all the polling places in Cambridge. Getting statewide copies of that data is, unfortunately, quite difficult.
Incidentally, Massachusetts does have a very good polling place lookup website. One simple way to solve this problem is to ask voters to text their address to our short code, and then to simulate a POST request to the "Where do I vote" website. Although this method is very simple, it's not ideal, for two reasons. First, it requires voters to send a very long message, which might be frustrating. Second, the "Where do I vote" website is actually really difficult to use, since address misspellings readily confuse it; if a voter lives on the street which might have spelling variations, like "Saint" and "St", he or she would likely have to try feeding the address in to the website several times before successfully pulling up a polling place. Considering the limitations of the text messaging interface, these obstacles are formidable.
I'll try and update here if we make significant headway with the project. It should be a lot of fun!
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