The U.S. Ballot Curing Project
Isaac Frumkin | Nicholas Bowen | Brice Halder | Andrew Zhang
We are a group of undergraduate students studying Computer
Science at Johns Hopkins University. Inspired by the potential to bring positive change, we
are excited to leverage our technical capabilities to help bring our democratic process into
the 21st century.
Running Service:
Ballot Curing Project
Website
Source Code:
Github Repo
·
Direct Download
Problem
Absentee ballot rejection is the act of “throwing out” votes due
to some sort of error with the ballot.
Potential issues include: invalid/missing signature, ID/address discrepancy, and/or being
registered in the wrong county.
Disproportionately, these issues affect voters from non-white, socioeconomically
disadvantaged communities.
As voting by absentee ballot is projected to become increasingly common in coming election
cycles,
making sure that this process does not perpetuate voter suppression is of great importance.
18 states allow for ballots with issues to be “cured”, a process that allows the voter to
amend their ballot problem
(by submitting additional verification) so that their vote will be counted in the election.
During elections there are
several groups (parties, non-profits, unions, etc.) that work to help voters cure their
ballots. Our team hopes to create
software that will increase the efficiency and accessibility of the ballot curing process by
helping the aforementioned
groups reach more voters with rejected ballots.
Description
Our idea is to create a website that allows users to run queries
on a database to get different outputs.
For example, a group interested in sending out volunteers to a certain county could filter
for rejected ballots that can be cured
in a certain county, while also applying further filters (e.g. race, ethnicity, age, gender,
etc.) depending on the available
information for each state. Currently, we are using publicly available information from the
Georgia Secretary of State
to form the basis of our project before we work to expand it to other states. The data that
we are currently using was taken from the Secretary
of State’s website and is dated by when it was processed, allowing us to compare data over
time.