Many New Zealanders don't vote in local body elections, but with less than two months until the elections, we're hoping a new site we've built for Local Government New Zealand will help increase voter turnout. Elections2010.co.nz makes it easier to participate by providing simple access to information about local candidates, and the site will also feature real-time election results.
Declining turnout numbers are a reflection of the difficulty people have had in the past in accessing information about candidates and issues. Relying on newspapers and voter packs received in the mail to know who they could vote for may not have been enough to allow some people to make an informed choice.
Now, however, with Elections2010.co.nz, voters can find out all they need to know on one easy-to-use site. One of the most impressive features is that we use GIS data and Google Maps to be able to determine which elections New Zealanders are eligible to vote in based on their home address.
From there, they can bring up a list of candidates in their region and find out about each one. Users can also ask a question of the candidates, have a look at previous results, search for a candidate, or browse an A-Z listing of candidates for both 2010 and 2007.
As a project, Elections2010.co.nz was very challenging because of all the data points involved. Across New Zealand, there are a number of elections, each election has a number of candidates, and each candidate has vital information to be shared. On the day, there will be lots of results, with a lot of relationships between different types of data—all of which will need to be available to users.
Of course, that's just the front end. The site is also easy to update. One of the features we're most proud of is the simple way that LGOL staff enter election results as they come in. Vote totals are very easy for them to securely enter or change, and the site automatically generates bar graphs of results.
In fact, when our developers showed it to our team, we were actually worried that maybe we made it too easy to change vote totals on the site, and that an evil genius with his eye on becoming mayor of Auckland could twist it to some nefarious purpose. Luckily, the site we designed only reports the official totals, which are tallied elsewhere. Phew! Democracy is in safe hands!
And on that note, a friendly reminder: If you're a New Zealander, please make sure you're informed and make sure you vote. If you're not from New Zealand, perhaps you should lobby for your country to provide a similar service? We’d love to work with you on it.
Update: In the 24 hours following October 9, Elections2010.co.nz received over 15 million hits, served around 1 million pages, with 80,000 unique visits, for a total of 40GB traffic.