[EL] using polling place finders

[Doug Spencer]

Doug,

The registrars of voters in California keep a spreadsheet of all polling
place addresses in their county. In the past, they have been very willing
to share that list with me, even though I don't live in the county. Perhaps
registrars in other states are similar. You would have to target individual
counties, though I presume you have a discrete list of university campuses
you are targeting, so that shouldn't be too difficult. There are several
free services that will geocode large lists of addresses in one batch (here's
Google<http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/spreadsheetsgeocoder/geocodespreadsheet.htm>,
for example) which you can then plot and analyze.

I hope that's helpful,
Doug

-----
Douglas M. Spencer
Jurisprudence and Social Policy Ph.D. Program
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
Phone: (415) 335-9698
E-mail: dspencer at berkeley.edu


On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Doug Hess <douglasrhess at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi. My students are researching distances between dorms and polling
> places. However, only a few states seem to have polling place finders
> (using either the government or databases compiled at nonprofit websites)
> that work for general addresses. By that I mean that many states want you
> to enter your name or other information to see where a certain person lives
> and where their polling place is. Obviously this restricts the states where
> we can examine distances between two points, as we can get dorm addresses
> (point A) but not the associated polling place (point B).
>
> Oddly, even on polling place locator websites like WI (link:
> https://vpa.wi.gov/AddressSearchScreen.aspx) if you type in the address
> for a huge dormitory, you get nothing. Surely somebody is registered at a
> dorm address of over a 1,000 students, and used their dorm street address.
> No?
>
> In any event, if people know of other mapping tools or datasets of polling
> places that allow for research like this, let me know. So far the majority
> of states require a log in or a name or that your address produce a
> registration file first. (Some larger counties have their own systems, but
> I haven't explored that yet.
>
> Doug Hess
>
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