Cook County Elections Data at Chicago City Data User Group

The theme of this month’s Chicago City Data User Group was election data. Ryan Chew, the Deputy Director of Elections from the Cook County Clerk’s office, and Geetha Lingham, manager for voter and ballot data, presented on the process and data used to run elections for Suburban and Unincorporated Cook County.

Also in attendance were students from the Latin School of Chicago’s Social Justice class.

Learning about #election data with my Social Justice students! #ChiData @ChicagoCityData @LSCsja

— Bridget Hennessy (@bohennessy) March 5, 2015

@LSCsja We’re at our first Chicago City Data User Group learning about election data! #ChiData

— Neelamjit Dhaliwal (@NKDhaliwal) March 5, 2015

Ryan spoke about the process involved to maintain accurate voter registration data.

Typos matter 4 voter data!@cookcounty data masters presenting on election data @ChicagoCityData @MSFTChicago #chidata pic.twitter.com/Kd27BM93HX

— Erin Simpson (@heyerinsimpson) March 5, 2015

Geetha focused on the process used to verify addresses to assign the proper boundaries and ballot styles for each voter.

Geetha Lingham shows the data sources involved in the Voter Registration Management System

Elections uses parcel boundaries with tax codes and census information to assign political districts to the voter #chidata

— Josh Kalov (@JoshKalov) March 5, 2015

Parcel boundaries: https://t.co/xRWAj1IjqV Tax code + Agencies: https://t.co/EA7OaimYKm #ChiData @ChicagoCityData

— Josh Kalov (@JoshKalov) March 5, 2015

For more on the presentation see Chicago City Data User Group co-organizer Adam Hecktman’s blog post and watch the presentation video.

Through our partnership with Cook County we have worked with the Cook County Clerk’s Election office to add or update Open Data including: