Help Democratize Democracy!

A few days ago, I found a really cool project on Twitter called OpenElections, which is trying to create a master dataset of every certified election result in the US. It’s gotten a chunk of critical acclaim, including a grant from the Knight Foundation.

Unfortunately, the work isn’t easy. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an excel sheet. But often times you’ll get a bad-quality scan of an image like this…

and the project will need your help turning it into this…

As someone interested in statistics and politics, I saw huge potential for this project. So when I saw a chance tweet calling for volunteers, I got on to their github page and started submitting pull requests. It’s really simple! This weekend I started working on the 2008 Presidential election, although I’ve still got a few counties to go. I can only imagine how useful this dataset could be, and it makes me feel proud to live in a country where an effort like this is even possible.

So go help democratize democracy, and help the open data movement! It’s not very hard to transcribe a few documents, and your effort will aid a very promising project!