Campaign result apps blooming.

As I watch the first of the results of the election come in, I’m struck by the wide variety of options of websites offering data. Until this election, we’ve been left obsessively reloading the SBE’s website, hopping around from precinct to precinct, district to district, trying to remember what the numbers were when last we checked. With the SBE having established XML feeds of election results numbers, updated simultaneous as their own website, everybody from Politico to VPAP to the Charlottesville Daily Progress is reusing these data in mapping and databases. There’s no doubt I’m going to put them to work on Richmond Sunlight. We’ve got our pick among mapping apps and, by next election, no doubt people will be putting these numbers to use in far more interesting ways than we can envision right now.

All of this comes of the SBE simply opening up their data feed. I don’t mean to trivialize the work that likely went into that, but there’s no doubt that the time and effort required is less than the work that would have been required for them to put together their own mapping, etc. applications. That’s the kind of government I suspect we all like.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

2 replies on “Campaign result apps blooming.”

  1. I appreciate it greatly, Waldo. All of the new stuff they put up there looks AMAZING (not to mention it didn’t crash this year. That’s the first time I can remember it not doing that!)

  2. Thanks for the shout out. The SBE should be commended for making this feed available. One note: Politico relied on a feed from the Associated Press, not SBE.

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