Election information in Europe

Making elections data accessible and available to all

Web search interest: where do I vote

United States, 2004 - present

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Helping users understand an election

By providing polling places, news, trends and results maps

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Bringing civic information to other users

An api for bringing civic information to developers

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Civic Information API

Knows your election, representatives and administrative areas

Elections

Representatives

Administrative Areas

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Already serving millions of queries

But only to developers in the United States

+25 million
queries on voter information in the United States

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Change.org uses our API

To understand where a petition should go to

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And others
Are using it for many different purposes

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Opening up political and administrative geographies

so we know where to put everything

First ever interoperable identifiers for political jurisdictions, enabling joins across disparate civic datasets
ocd-division/country:<country_code>[/<type>:<type_id>]+ ocd-division/country:us/state:nc/cd:2 ocd-division/country:us/district:dc/anc:4a/section:8

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We work with the local community

and want to engage with civic information organisations

Standard XML Specification for polling places Map locations to administrative and electoral geographies Administrative and electoral geographies to polling places

www.votinginfoproject.org

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We use it to help users find out about politics

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153,676
Polling Places

3,007 counties 16 Boroughs in Alaska 64 Parishes in Louisiana 100

developer built apps

8,398
Early Vote Locations

39,035
Candidates

600
sites embedded our Voter Information Tool

4,065
candidate twitter handles

23 million
Voter Information Queries

Others use it in many different ways

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Improve Data Coverage

Improve Data Quality

Improve Data Publishing (and standards)

Challenges for the future

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Data is open, but not really machine readable

Over 85% of the European Open Data is a spreadsheet or worse

PDF Excel CSV XML Shapefile

238 63 89 54 8

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Open data lacks quality

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Electoral Committee

News Site Engineer

News & Media

Google Engineer

(Local) Government

. . .

Scientists, Ministries etc..

Data publishing (current situation)

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Transport Agencies

(Local) Government

Other public transport applications

Another market that already fixed this

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What do we need?
Geographies, persons and processes

Geographic Administrative and political geographies (structure and shapes) Polling station locations Candidates Ballots Profiles Financing Process Registration Results
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Electoral Committee

News & Media

Open Elections Standard

(Local) Government

Scientists, Ministries etc..

. . .

Data publishing (future situation)

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Timely

Standardised

Open

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developers.google.com/civic-information

Questions?

Stef van Grieken Technical Program Manager svangrieken@google.com

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