I Voted

The JESS3 team has made no secret about its interest in and passion for geosocial.

And, with our roots in DC, civic participation through voting is close to our hearts. We also pride ourselves in helping C-SPAN leverage social media in their coverage during the 2008 Elections, where we designed and developed the Convention Hubs and Debate Hubs, respectively.

And so, in this spirit, we give you: I Voted.

Working closely with Eric Friedman and the team at foursquare, the Voting Information Project (Google x Pew Center on the States), Engage and other experienced digital political strategists like Jordan Raynor, David Almacy, Tracy Viselli and Patrick Ottenhoff. The joint effort encourages voters to check-in at their polling place and share that they have voted with their friends through social media. Including the text #ivoted in their polling station check-in will unlock the badge.

The project was designed with three purposes in mind:

1) Encourage civic participation through the distribution of the “I Voted” foursquare badge;

2) Increase transparency by visualizing how many voters are checking-in, and at which polling locations; and

3) Develop a replicable and scalable system to use for the 2012 Presidential Elections and beyond.

For our part, JESS3 built a custom map visualization around cutting-edge technologies like HTML5, using semantic components and new features like the “canvas” element for interactive graphics. I also used some extra night and weekend time to ensure coordination and communications between partners.

The site is accessing over 108,000 official polling locations provided by the Voting Information Project, which were then geocoded by the foursquare team and made available to JESS3 through the foursquare API.

Our case study is live at “Foursquare I Voted” and includes early sketches.

Written by: Leslie Bradshaw | President & COO, JESS3



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