The election will be over soon, okay?
The attack ads for this upcoming election have been driving me insane these past few months. I am pretty sure people all over the country feel the same, but it seems much worse living in a swing state. The candidates also visit this area often, shutting down major highways and streets when they visit and causing massive headaches for the citizens in the area. No matter what the outcome is after November 6th, the end of the election will be a breath of relief for the most of us.
you and me both, little girl on the internet.
So while browsing twitter in between talks during RubyConf this past weekend, it surprised me I when took interest in an election-related tweet by Philadelphia's Chief Data Officer, Mark Headd:
The Google Civic Information API is a service that provides polling locations, early voting locations, candidate information, and other official election information by election year. I was intrigued by the service and immediately wrote a super simple gem to easily access the data with ruby.
The open data community in Philadelphia created a SMS-based polling locator during their past few elections to provide a way for internetless households to quickly find their voting location. Does Boulder/Denver have a service like that? How about other places in the US? The answer seemed to point to no, so I created my own service using the gem I wrote, Sinatra, Twilio, and Heroku.
If you want it try it out yourself, text your address to 484-477-0738.
While creating the project, I found myself getting more excited about the election and the importance it held for me as an American citizen. As I was finishing up the app, an Obama canvasser stopped by my apartment to make sure I knew where my polling location was for this Tuesday's election. I proudly made her stay an extra 30 seconds to look at my creation (I think she was only mildly impressed). Had she stopped by two days earlier, I probably would have been much more curt and sarcastic with her.
This project taught me that's insanely easy to set up a simple SMS-based application using Sinatra, Heroku, and Twilio. Why not create more text messaging tools for major events and emergencies (such as Sandy)? And it also taught me that getting involved with open data is a great way to dissolve cynicism about government.
Edit: I should add that Twilio has offered so much support for this project!

