By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
On Election Day this month, Princeton went high-tech in delivering results to the public.
Collaborating with community members, the town unveiled on its Internet site a web-based app that provided live, detailed unofficial election results in a way that would have made political strategists salivate. Not only could people find out who won, they also could see how candidates for council, county offices and state assembly did in each voting district of town, complete with charts and mapping.
It was the detailed, beyond just the basics presentation of who won and who lost that municipal chief information officer Robert McQueen might have had in mind when the town partnered with Code for Princeton. The self-described group of “techies,” some 319 members strong, used their knowledge of computers and software to create something the town said is novel for a municipal government to have.
“A lot of residents don’t understand the elections are done through the county, and that’s really where the official results are all kept,” Mr. McQueen said Friday. “And so if you wanted to know about Princeton, you needed to go to the county’s website in order to get that information. I felt that, if residents would look at our site for that information (and) if we could have an app that we could update and populate in real time as we’re getting data in, it would be beneficial.”
Enter Anouk Stein, a radiologist who went back to college to learn computer programming, and Kirsten Smith, a native of Amsterdam who works for an international publisher doing data science and computer programming. Ms. Smith used data visualization software in the project for the town.
“I had some ideas of how we could get the data visualized just because I do that every day, all day,” Ms. Smith said.
“It really felt like being part of a start-up. It didn’t feel like a bureaucracy,” said Ms. Stein of dealing with the town on the project.
The two women and other volunteers helped create the app that went up live on election night. Aside from the municipal staff involved, there was no charge to the municipality.
“Working with a volunteer group, a community-based organization like Code for Princeton, it’s a way to save to get better services out there without spending money for the most part,” Mr. McQueen said. “I think that’s a key factor here.”
Aside from using it on Election Day, the app is seen as an education tool for prospective political candidates. In addition to this year’s results, there is election data from 2014 providing the same breakdown of information.
“If you’re a potential candidate running in town, you can now look at districts and see who voted, how many came out and if it’s a district you may have to campaign harder in,” Mr. McQueen said. “So there’s a lot of benefits to the public that they can go back and look at past elections and see how the voter turnout was and how that worked.”
To learn more about Code for Princeton, visit www.codeforprinceton.org.
