Greece Outside In: Hack the vote: how open data is giving elections back to the voters

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Hack the vote: how open data is giving elections back to the voters

This is the year of elections, across the world. How is open data changing the process? This was the subject of a recent Strata live webcast. Here's what we talked about

As the world's economies move from crisis to crisis, governments are falling all over the globe. This has been a year of elections beyond Washington, the power of the vote changing how we see the world.

France
Egypt
Greece
London

You don't have to watch the US primaries to find drama and intrigue. But the results, the key stuff of those elections is increasingly being claimed by the people. This is how that data is being democratised.

How we see elections has changed a lot. This is 1966 - and Canadian psephologist Bob McKenzie shows the results with the BBC Swingometer - in use since 1955 and still around today.

And in 2010 - the swingometer is still in place but presentation has moved on.

What else has stayed the same? The ownership of that data. If you're part of the media, you get the results live, if not, then you have to rely on the establishment, the BBC, CNN or whoever can stump up the cash to pay for it.

And this is what you get - this is the Guardian feed of results from the Press Association.

The raw data of elections is turnouts, swings, and vote percentages. And it's live. But that power - which belongs to AP, or PA and the BBC in the UK - is starting to shift.

We saw it in the US primaries, when John Keefe at WNYC spotted something interesting: Google elections was faster than AP.

And the official data is still less than useful. When London voted recently, it was a key election - 8m people decided who was to lead the city. And the results we got were for huge combined constituencies, representing thousands of people. Too big to tell you anything about who voted for what and where.

Contrast that to this data, released a week after the election by London elects. It shows votes by electoral ward - much smaller areas that give a real sense of how the city voted. It shows how Labour's votes were predominantly in central London - and the Conservative candidate's votes were in the outskirts of the city. This is the doughnut effect of the capital.

But it also shows you interesting details, especially when you look at second preferences - where the Green vote was strong, and how the Liberal Democrats suffered. London elects made the data available this time - net time we will get even more.

How has it worked elsewhere? How have hackers taken control of the process?

In Argentina, in October last year, Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires with political analyst Andy Tow set up this site, which brought together official data from the provisional counts and candidate details. In addition, a university project provided biographical information and the policy platforms of each presidential ticket. They then incorporated census socio-economic data too.

The team of 30 hackers began work the day before the election and carried on through. They used the best free tools available to create something dyadic and interesting: Google Fusion Tables, Google Maps, and vector graphics libraries. The data itself can be used to compare previous election results too and was merged with demographic data.

They became the official source of information: maps from the project were used by media platforms during the elections and afterwards.

In Greece - which has just had its second national election in weeks - that data has been available for some time. A private company has managed the information since 1981 for the Greek government, the results come in from each polling station, are collated to a central datacentre and then transmits the data. Although the data is open to the public, through the Home Office website, you can only get the CSV version if you're accredited media. So, it's open, up to a limit.

The results are real time - ish - updated every ten minutes.

But this year, a small data consultancy, igraphics.gr has built one of the most innovative representations of the data.

The French elections represent a bigger change: with hackers group Regards Citoyens, running hackathons through both rounds of the presidential elections and the recent legislative vote.

This year, for the first time, the French government gave access to previously restricted XML feed of the live data. The team could then publish live results and analysis as the results rolled in.

But crucially, the team were allowed access to the press room at the French Ministry of the Interior. This allowed them to extract the detailed turnout data - which the Ministry had but had never published before - providing the information on paper.

That allowed the team to digitise the data, and compare this election to previous ones. And by publishing the data their users could point out mistakes in the official figures.

And RC turned the inaccessible XML files into CSV files for download that anyone can use.

The availability of data allows us to seriously factcheck politicians' claims. As Mark Twain said:

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes

And there is, of course, a lot of big data stories out of these elections, especially when you look at how parties are targeting their campaigns.

But in the end, the important thing about these examples is how the voting data is coming back to the people.

Stalin, of all people, knew how crucial this information is:

The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do

And, without full, open election data, monitoring those counters is not possible. But I can't end with Stalin, so instead we have Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the world wide web - and his battle cry, which is equally relevant: