Using the Whole Whale - A Nonprofit Podcast

013: Using data to make voting easier


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Democracy Works & TurboVote, Co-founder Seth Flaxman talks about using data and technology to help people vote via mail. Their main product, TurboVote has had great success due to their team’s ability to gather the most accurate list of election locations in the country. They have made voting via absentee ballot as easy as getting a movie from Netflix, which is the first step of their larger plan to make voting easier in the US.

Resources
  • Mechanical Turk – you can use this service for large, repetitive tasks that require a human eye.
  • Odesk.com and screen scrapers – you can hire developers to create simple Python screen scrapers to aggregate data from the web.
  • TurboVote.org – great tool for setting up a voter registration and absentee ballots on your site.
  • Transcription

    Episode 13

    George: This is Using the Whole Whale. A Podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world. This is George Weiner your host and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.

    George: I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s probable that you have missed the chance to vote in more elections than you’ve actually voted in elections. And this is something that really frustrates today’s guest, Seth Flaxmen who’s a co-founder of democracy works. Welcome to episode thirteen where we’re gonna be talking with Seth about how they use big data and aggregated polling locations in order to make it easier for people to vote via absentee ballot. This project gained the attention of little known companies like Google who actually contacted them for that database. So we’re gonna talk with them and see where this project is going.

    George: Seth thank you for having us here today on the podcast. You work for and you are the founder of Democracy Works. Tell us a bit more, who are you and what do you do?

    Seth: Co-founder actually.

    George: Co-founder.

    Seth: Co-founder

    George: Yeah I already got one wrong. Nailed it.

    Seth: I have to make sure to give Katie credit you know. Owning half the organization.

    George: So tell me what do you guys do?

    Seth: So the idea’s to use technology to make a seamless modern voting system for everyone. That’s the sort of 30,000 feet deal. And turbo vote is the main sort of program we have a site and the idea there is that anyone should be able to sign up online one time and then get all the help they need to stay registered to vote and voting in all of their elections for the rest of their life. So an entirely voter centered design voting system. But we just launched this year our second program called Ballot Scout and it’s a tool for local election offices. We did a nine month technology study to figure out what tech election offices actually wanted and would spend some money to acquire. And what they really want is a way to track all the mail ballots that they’re starting to send people more and more. Cause in 32 states now everyone can vote by mail. Every year more people vote by mail, but the tracking system isn’t that good so ballots get lost. People call them constantly ask them where their ballots are, have them returned. So that’s our second program.

    George: So it’s pre

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