Ballot Initiative Signature Validation
Opened this issue · 5 comments
What is the idea
Ballot initiatives require in-person, by-hand signatures and addresses that exactly match what's on file with the Secretary of State. To help ensure that folks who want to sign an initiative don't have their signatures thrown out, we would like a mobile/tablet app that easily displays that individual's (publicly available) address information so they can fill out a ballot initiative accurately.
Why
When inspecting signatures for a ballot initiative, the Secretary of State's office takes a representative sample of signatures, determines a percentage of them are valid, and then uses that to accept a percentage of all signatures submitted.
What is the evidence that it is an issue in our community?]
ballot initiatives often require a much higher number of signatures than legally required due to the invalidation of large percentages of the voting population.
Potential Partner(s)?
350 Colorado, other politically-active non-profits
Possible deadline? next legislative session or sometime in 2018
Details
Champion: [To be filled out during exploration stage]
Repo: [To be filled out during exploration stage]
Waffle Board: [To be filled out during exploration stage]
@ximsce to spike getting ballot data the secretary of state.
Update from 350 Colorado:
As far as the ballot initiative is concerned, they are going with "EveryAction specifically — would be much more stable, cost and time effective, and easy to get started with."
They also discussed a "Pledge to Sign" initiative that I'm less familiar with:
"As far as I know, the big ask for us currently would be to build the "pledge to sign" system. We need a way to collect contact information from people so we can find them once we have the signature packets in hand. It doesn't have to be a fancy system, but knowing where people live, like their zip code would be super helpful. At the base level I can see this being a Google Form populating a sheet that also spits out some reporting or runs some regular expressions to compile zip codes into regions. On the fancy end, maybe it's a custom database and slick looking front-end. "
So, there might still be some interest around making a friendlier version of the SoS voter registration page, either as a mobile/offline app or potentially some kind of Facebook chatbot.
@ximsce I'm interested in helping out w/potential partners. Let's talk next week (once the Re:Imagine launch is out of the way.)
@ximsce I got a bit of background from the Secretary of State's office on this. I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind for the project, so I'll just shotgun the information here and hopefully it's helpful. Let me know if you've got any questions the Secretary of State office could answer and I can probably get answers for them:
- Signatures aren't publicly available, but they are working on a project internally that will use software to help improve the signature matching process.
- For $50, you can get a data dump of the publicly available voter registration data. This includes:
- Full name
- Full address (including zip code)
- Year of birth
- Voting history (not what they voted for, but whether they voted in each election)
- Phone number (if provided)
- Party affiliation
- You can also subscribe to this information to get regular updates to it as it changes. There's an additional fee for that, I'm not sure what it is.
- The most sophisticated signature-gatherers can usually get over 90% of their signatures matching, but they do a lot of work to be sure that happens. For example, they go door-to-door with petitions and cross-reference it with a voter list (obtained via the $50 mentioned above). That way, they can confirm the person at the house is the person registered to that address (it eliminates issues where the voter is registered somewhere else). Other people look up voter registrations on the spot when gathering petitions, that way, they can update the voter registration if the user is registered to an old address.