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Question of the day
Thursday, Dec 14, 2006 - Posted by Rich Miller Oops. Forgot to post the QOTD. You’d think I would remember to do it out of habit, if nothing else. The good news is my hangover from last night’s outstanding holiday party is finally starting to subside. Thanks once again to everyone who showed up. We even had a few bigshots there, which was nice. One of those bigshots was Daniel White, the executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections. Director White told me the Board is in the process of completely revamping its website. I use the site almost every day, often many times a day, so I had some pointed criticisms (probably made a little too pointed by the Miller Lites I was drinking - oops, another trade name) and some suggestions. Today’s question: What would you do to improve the State Board of Elections website? They read the blog over there, so it’s certain that your suggestions will be seen.
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- Squideshi - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:07 am:
A good start would be to post the official results from the 2006 General Election. Another would be the ability to subscribe and receive email updates about recent filings. Also, the Board should consider using an open source platform to reduce cost and improve security.
- Rich Miller - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:08 am:
Two of my suggestions were:
* Drop the goofy javascript code.
* Put more links within search results. For instance, if I pull up candidates in the “X” House District, there ought to be links to their campaign finance reports and election results.
I had others, but I’ll stop here for now.
- Snark - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:09 am:
The 2006 general election results are online, they were put up after they were certified on Dec 1.
It really is a great website and if you have ever tried to look up donations at other states you’ll begin to understand just how impressive it is, especially compared to the FEC. The only thing I would really like is the ability to download search results in some sort of delimited format so I could dump them into a spreadsheet or database. And direct linking to web pages.
- Bill - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:18 am:
The campaign disclosure page is excellent! I really like the recently filed reports section. Keep up the good work!!
I hope that you don’t screw it up.
- Rich Miller - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:20 am:
I didn’t think to mention this last night, but RSS feeds would be very helpful to stay on top of who has filed for office and who has filed disclosure reports.
- DuPage progressive - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:26 am:
It’s been a while since I’ve tried to do election targeting, but seems to me it was a pain in the butt to get election results by legislative district.
Is there a way they could post election results — for each legislative district, and post each precincts’ results????
example — how did Blago, Quinn, Madigan, Giann., Hynes do in each legislative district????
I may not be remembering correctly, but seems to me that is one of the most time-consuming tasks for each campaign to do because you need to go to each county for those specific numbers.
It SURE would be great if it could be done by the entity that gathers election results from throughout the state…
- Squideshi - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:29 am:
Snark, do you have a link to those results?
- Anon - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:31 am:
It would be nice if there were an easier way to search through contributions. Now, when you look up a PAC, you are not necessarily getting all of their contributions because every committee lists places differently. Maybe standardize the PAC names for easier searches?
- Snark - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:40 am:
I think that you still can’t directly link to underlying pages there, but if you go to the main page and click on the green box that says “Election Information” and from there click on the link on the left that says “Vote Totals” it will take you to a drop down field where you can select any primary or general election going back to 1998 and the top selection is for the 2006 General. From there you can pick whichever race you want the results for.
- Cal Skinner - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:41 am:
I have trouble linking to specific pages of campaign disclosure reports.
Maybe it’s just my inexperience, of course.
- Frequent user of ISBE site - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:47 am:
It’s a great site, as a previous poster noted, particularly compared to the FEC site. My hope is they don’t do something that somehow diminishes search capabilities.
One thing I think would be useful is to set up an engine so it’s possible to search campaign committees’ officers, past and present. I’d like to enter a name and find out what committee they’ve been an officer of.
Also, is there any way that the board could put any of the congressional material it receives online, such as ethics statements members of the state’s delegation must file in D.C.
I think some cumulative data would be interesting to post, as well. What are the 10 largest contributions that have been reported during a period? Same for expenditures. What about who’s spending the most on legal fees, payroll, etc. Hynes’ website does some of that.
This is a good question, Rich.
- Squideshi - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 11:53 am:
Snark, you’re right. I had to page through all of the totals, broken out by county, in order to see the totals for each candidate. I was hoping for something perhaps a little more prominent, like a link on the main page that says “election results” and actually indicates the winner of each race.
It sounds like another feature that most people are requesting is the ability to direcly link to various pages within the Board’s website.
- Snark - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 12:01 pm:
Yeah you’re right. Another thing that would be great is if it had a field for percentage for each of the results. I usually just dump it into excel and compute them myself but it would be nice if that was already there.
And whoever mentioned the precinct level results and the results by district is right on. That is a huge undertaking and I normally just wait and get that from either the NCEC or the Almanac of Illinois Politics.
- Jake P - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 12:38 pm:
feeds for filing, feeds for particular committees to see activity, and of course, deep links. The urls you try to link to break.
- Jeff Trigg - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 12:39 pm:
Election history before 1998.
- Anon - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 12:46 pm:
The State Board’s site is great and any improvements would be minor. Now, take a look at the Chicago BOE’s site. Awful. Fortunately, someone is doing a better job tracking aldermanic races at www.aldertrack.typepad.com
Looks like this site is going to roll-out some type of futures options exchange based on the 100+ aldermanic candidates.
- VanillaMan - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 12:55 pm:
All the information available is useless if it is not available to all tax paying citizens.
The greatest flaw seen in public web sites today is the lack of services for visually impaired web users.
Have the guys over at Elections turn off their monitor, and see if they can get the information they want from their site. Until they can send what they want to a printer - without using a monitor - they do not have a very well designed web site, let alone one that is accessible for the visually impaired.
If you can design a web site that lets users access information without looking, then you have streamlined you site and designed it so that ANYONE can use it.
If we commit to designing for the visually impaired, then we have a design that is easier to use for those with vision.
That is the benchmark.
Until we stop taxing the visually impaired for web sites they cannot use, build it for them too.
- Woe is us - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 12:56 pm:
Miller Lites: “Illinois pundits/political bloggers not named Rich Miller”
- sam - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 12:57 pm:
I was searching and found a fun site that maps contributions. It looks old and outdated, though, with only information for the 2004 elections. And it says it is still in beta - only has info on reps.
www.illinoiselections.org
The google mapping thing is interesting, though.
- Yellow Dog Democrat - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 1:00 pm:
Debug the campaign contribution search engine screens and enable tab-delimited downloading of results.
New media and campaign finance reform advocates will find analysis much easier.
- Squideshi - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 2:33 pm:
I agree with VanillaMan. It’s not difficult to design a website that is platform neutral and complies with accepted web standards. That would go a long way in making the site easier to use for those with disabilities.
- Anon - Thursday, Dec 14, 06 @ 3:30 pm:
There should be a single repository of precinct level election data statewide. It belongs at the State Board. Anyone who has ever tried to run an upstart campaign knows how hard it is to get that kind of data, particularly for districts that cross county or city lines, and it would be a boon for all political scientists and reporters. And yes, it should go WAY before 1998.
The data exist, let’s see it in one useful place.