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 turnoutTannen, 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“hey jonathan, how many people do you think you need to submit their voter number to make good estimates?”
“i dunno… fifty? i’d be floored if i got a hundred.”
134 Philadelphians have shared their turnout. As of 10:35.https://t.co/Cat1vDtwnZ
— Jonathan Tannen🥉 (@jtannen215) May 15, 2018
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But wait, there’s more!
Here are five more civic engagement tools for election day:
- Committee of Seventy’s Digital Ballot Tool: Prep for the voting booth with this online tool, powered by CivicEngine and a product of BallotReady.
- Philadelphia Votes polling place lookup: Enter your address and get your polling place through the website from the Office of the Philadelphia City Commissioners.
- Leverage: Keep tabs on this prototype-stage campaign finance tool — initially born at a Code for Philly hackathon — which looks to offer data on campaign finance via publicly available data.
- Ballot Box: Once the votes are tallied, use the digital tool to review and compare results from previous elections
- Committee of Seventy’s voter experience survey: After voting, tell the nonpartisan organization how things went.
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