Civic News

Watch this live graph of Philly voter turnout (plus 5 other Election Day tools)

Today's the day to vote in the primaries. Here are some locally made tools to keep an eye on.

It's Election Day for Pennsylvania and three other states. (Photo by Roberto Torres)

Jonathan Tannen, a West Philly-based urban demographer, runs a data-centric blog focused on Philly and local elections called Sixty-Six Wards.

In honor of Tuesday’s primary elections — happening across Pennsylvania and three other states — Tannen’s blog rolled out a data analytics model that estimates turnout numbers across town based on self-reported voter data.

Using voters’ ward, division, time of day and voter number — coupled with historic turnout data for the wards that haven’t self reported — Tannen’s model estimates that, as of 11:48, some 62,881 Philadelphians have cast their vote across the city, based on self-reported data from 201 voters in 38 wards.

“Estimating turnout live requires simultaneously estimating two things: each Division’s relative mobilization and the time pattern of voters throughout the day,” Tannen wrote in the blog post announcing the tracker. “The 100th voter means something different in a Division that had 50 voters in 2014 than it does in a Division that had 200, and it means something different at 8 a.m. than it does at 7 p.m. Further, Philadelphia has 1,686 Divisions, and I don’t think we’ll get data on every Division (no matter how well my dedicated readers blast out the link). I use historic correlations among Divisions to guess the current turnout in Divisions for which no one has submitted data.”

Track turnout

Tannen, who works as a research scientist at Facebook according to his website, said on Twitter that inputs to the voter data submission form have gone past even his biggest estimates:

Submit voter data

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But wait, there’s more!

Here are five more civic engagement tools for election day:

Companies: Committee of Seventy

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