Geo-Enabled Elections in the News – Data, Progress Across the U.S.; 2022 Focus

NSGIC HQ | May 31, 2022

The Geo-Enabled Elections project was featured in the news this spring, shining a light on the work to make elections more accurate and efficient using GIS. The topic is timely, given that new voting districts are being rolled out across the country, followed by a string of local and national elections.

Jill Clark and Joseph Kerski’s excellent blog, centered on public domain spatial data, featured a discussion on how the data used to conduct elections can be improved using data culled from other sources. Kerski, a geographer with a distinguished career in GIS and education, serves as education manager at Esri. The blog, Spatial Reserves, continues the conversation started in the book by Clark and Kerski, The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data, and aims to provide GIS practitioners and instructors with the essential skills to find, acquire, format, and analyze public domain spatial data.

NSGIC’s guest blog post discussed how voter roll data can be audited and enhanced using data from other realms, including assessor and transportation department data. It also touched on how election data in GIS form can contribute to transparency and voter confidence. The blog post can be found here.

Separately, the publication electionline on May 5 featured examples of progress made across the country in the area of election modernization. The article also highlighted the new Resources for Election Directors available on the Geo-Enabled Elections project’s website. This set of tools, free to download, is designed to help election administrators and their GIS partners elevate their use of GIS in elections, improving accuracy and saving work effort.

Lastly, the article previewed NSGIC’s focus for its Geo-Enabled Elections project during 2022, the project’s final year: a survey of the nation’s state election directors. The planned survey report, to be published in the fall, will document advances in voter address management and auditing, states’ access to technology and systems capable of using GIS location information, collaboration with state GIOs, and more. The full electionline article is available here.