How mapping tech is revolutionizing election administration

When St. Louis County, Missouri, kicked off its redistricting process after the 2010 Census, local officials used colored pencils on transparent paper to redraw their legislative boundaries and reflect population shifts.

Ten years later, following the 2020 Census, officials in Missouri’s most populous county had traded in their pencils and paper for geographic information system mapping. St. Louis County, despite delays wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, had automated the process and used GIS to redraw the lines with the updated residency data. The result was more accurate and transparent maps.

Eric Fey, director of elections in St. Louis County, said this most recent round of redistricting was “night and day” compared to years past.

The story was similar in Orange County, California, which used to use “reams of paper” in its redistricting process, according to Matt Eimers, GIS supervisor at the Orange County Registrar of Voters. Officials there would have to compare their hand-drawn maps against paper records, which was a laborious process.

Only a handful of local governments are using the technology in this way, but GIS has revolutionized elections administration in these counties.

“It's a powerful tool in that it takes away the human mistakes and brings all this data into one system for everyone to see quickly and efficiently,” Eimers said in an interview on the sidelines of GIS company Esri’s User Conference. Esri's technology and software is in the products used by those jurisdictions.

“Elections don't move,” Fey said at the Esri conference. “We can't push back an election, so we need to do things” like fix errors. If they don’t, the county could be forced to rerun an election, which is costly for local governments. “This sounds very cliche, but it's revolutionized the way we do things here in St. Louis County,” Fey added.

GIS has helped voters, too. In the last few years, St. Louis County moved to a so-called Vote Anywhere model, where a registered voter can cast a ballot at any polling place in the county. Orange County uses a similar method, known as the “Vote Center” model.

The counties have both built polling place lookup tools, which uses GIS technology to help voters find the nearest voting centers. Residents also can enter an address and see a sample ballot with all the candidates and initiatives they can vote on. And on Election Day itself, voters can use the tool to look up wait times at different polling locations. Orange County’s tool includes information on services offered at each vote center, including languages spoken by staff.

“This stuff was not always readily available on our website until several years ago,” Fey said, “so it's also saved us a lot of work internally answering phone calls for these basic types of questions.”

“It's all about making sure the voter is in the right spot so they can get the right ballot,” Eimers agreed.

Philadelphia is also utilizing the technology. It uses it to help with questions from election staff. The Philadelphia City Commissioners, which runs elections, created an election day call center for the 8,000 board members and staff across its more than 1,700 polling places to phone in any issues they encounter.

Before GIS, call takers would log those issues in an Excel spreadsheet and use it to keep track of whether they had been fixed. Call takers would then send text messages to people in the field, known as “rovers,” to resolve those issues. Now, rovers have city-issued smartphones that log their locations for quicker response times, track tickets in real time and mark them as resolved on the go.

Jeff Venziale, director of IT for the Philadelphia County Board of Elections, said in an interview at the Esri conference that GIS is a massive upgrade on what was a “very rudimentary” system before.

The city also uses GIS to manage its election day assets like voting machines, ballot papers, electronic poll books and networking tools to allow peer-to-peer connections. The software maps where these assets are located and when they are being picked up by city police officers at the end of the vote. Eventually, Venziale said he would like to provide precinct workers an estimated time of arrival for equipment pickup, based on the police’s route.

In Philadelphia’s last election, 98% of election day materials and equipment had been picked up by midnight on election night, Venziale said. Orange and St. Louis counties have similar setups.

Tracking materials through GIS should help fix major issues, like preventing a polling place notorious for running out of ballot papers from doing so. Before, Venziale said, precincts might have a reputation for things going wrong, but technology can help solve them before they get out of hand by looking to historical data for trends.

“Rather than just being reactive, it's being proactive,” said Dan Warner, an IT project manager with the city commissioners.

Tabulating votes also benefits from GIS. Fey said the biggest improvement it has brought is increased transparency, as it allows election officials to track “the most critical components.” Rick Stream, the other director of elections in St. Louis County, noted that Missouri is already quick to count votes given state law, but GIS is an added extra to improve the process.

“Rick and I can see throughout the whole process where everybody is, have they made it to a collection point yet, has a collection point made it back to us yet,” Fey said. “What has been accounted for, what has not yet been accounted for. I think it also makes it a more secure process.”

Philadelphia, meanwhile, came in for heavy criticism from some quarters in 2020 for taking more than two weeks to count its general election ballots, including a large number of absentee votes. Warner said vote counting has since sped up to a matter of hours, while GIS means they can better answer questions about the process and be transparent.

“If someone asks us a question on where a machine is, where one of our workers is, what they were doing,” Warner said, “we have all the answers.”