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Election Tech Tuesday
This Election Data Dispatch series explores emerging issues in elections technology and their relationship to the future of voting and civic engagement in America.
ElectionDesk Provides a Social Media Platform for Election Officials
Social media has emerged as an excellent means for government officials to follow public concerns and to respond quickly. The Pew Charitable Trusts has worked closely with Engage, a technology and public relations firm, to harness the power of social media for election administration. In this dispatch, Mathias Hansen, our guest poster and engineering director for Engage, discusses the ongoing development of ElectionDesk.
ElectionDesk is a social media-monitoring dashboard that enables election officials to learn about problems at the polls and to respond in real time. It launched in 2012 as a part of the Voting Information Project, or VIP. During the 2012 general election, officials monitored and responded to thousands of posts from voters on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, streamlining the feedback process.
Since 2012, Engage has continued to enhance ElectionDesk’s functionality based on user feedback, and the newly released version features significant updates, including:
Determining the location of a post or tweet can be challenging unless the user specifies his or her position. Because of privacy settings in Facebook and Google+, neither network provides location data. A small percentage of tweets, however, are already assigned a location from GPS coordinates offered by a user. ElectionDesk can attempt to geocode a tweet—assigning latitude and longitude coordinates to address information—based on the user’s profile. If there are no matches, it can look at the time zone or locale to get a rough estimate.
The updated tool will be available for free to election officials for the November 2014 general election.
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