Blog.OnlinePrimary.us

There was still some work to do today on the voting page.  Issues to work through included how to discourage people from voting multiple times, and how (or whether) to limit the voting to people who will be elligible to vote in the actual election.  In the end, I decided it would be interesting to let anybody, eligible or not, to cast a vote; but I’ll ask people to say whether they’ll be elligible or not.  That way, results can be filtered to look only at self-identified elligible voters, but we can also see how those results compare to those of people who are not elligible (too young, not citizens, convicted felons, what-have-you).  Since Online Primary is not an actual election, why not try to find out what people in the non-elligible group are thinking too.  It might be illuminating to see if, for example, the top choice of elligible voters turns out to be the one least-liked by citizens of other countries. 

As for repeat voters, it will be impossible to screen them out entirely.  But I’ll have one of those “Can you read these squiggly numbers and type them into a box” things (a “CAPTCHA” in tech-speak) to discourage robot voters.  And I’m working on an algorithm to give a “credibility score” to each vote; with the results filterable to omit any votes below a chosen credibility score.  (This algorithim is the only element of the Online Primary code I don’t plan to make public.)  It’s not perfect, but I hope it will be good enough to make the results reasonably interesting.

Ah yes, the results.  They were on today’s agenda too.  I have big ambitions for the different ways people can look at the results.  (One element of the experiment is exploring what happens when people can see the current state of the results before they cast their vote.)  You’ll be able to see the grand totals, of course, with no filters applied.  But I also want to make it possible for visitors to “slice-and-dice” the results in a variety of ways, using as much self-identifying information as voters are willing to provide (state of residence, gender, age group, party registration, and several others).  Then there’s that business of looking at the results with different formulas applied to the ranked-choice and anybody-but votes people enter.  I’m punting for now on wireframing the details of all that, but I’ve done enough to let the visual design process go forward.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 7:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.