Thousands of people move every day in America, which presents unique challenges for cities and counties before any election. Election agencies must ensure that voters are accurately assigned to districts, polling locations are properly sited and ballots are customized to reflect each special district.

Local governments work year-round on election-related tasks, such as determining precinct and district boundaries, and scouting polling locations. And, on election day, local officials have to withstand the intense scrutiny of their operations and the results. Because much of election management is tied to geography, many election agencies are turning to geographic information system (GIS) technology to manage and share data needed by local government staff, poll volunteers and voters.

Setting boundaries

Keeping track of voters moving into, out of and around cities and counties is one of the primary challenges for elections departments. “The voter landscape is constantly changing in any urban area. All kinds of things are happening, which means that voter registration activity collides with your address data, changing the way precinct and district boundaries need to be drawn,” says Kenneth Bennett, division manager of the Precincting, GIS and Election Tally Systems Division of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (RR/CC). “For the Registrar of Voters, boundary management is a continuous process of collecting new information and responding to it.”

Working for the most populous county in the country, Los Angeles County officials have their hands full planning elections. The county has more than 400 districts for nearly 10 million residents and may conduct more than 60 separate elections during a year. The county uses GIS to draw precincts; manage census, street and district data for election activities; and manage logistics for poll workers. “GIS technology serves an essential facet of our work — increasing effectiveness, improving reliability and boosting productivity,” Bennett says.

Los Angeles-area districts rely on county officials to draw accurate precinct boundaries and confirm that district boundaries match precincts. When precincts are consolidated, the RR/CC uses a GIS-based application to group precincts by district assignments. Then the application combines precincts within the same ballot groups (geographic areas that have the same district characteristics for the active districts in an election) into election precincts. The technology ensures that everyone within a particular election precinct votes on the same set of contests.

Election officials also try to ensure residents have few geographic barriers between their homes and their polling places. “We don't want a six-lane freeway running through the middle of an election precinct, making it difficult for voters to reach their polling place,” Bennett says. “We have to consider any natural or man-made barrier that obstructs voter access. We cannot, for example, mix voters living inside and outside of a gated community when the polling place is inside the gates. GIS helps us solve these types of problems; while also helping us to ensure that precinct boundaries are accurate and voter counts are under any prescribed limits.”

The Maricopa County, Ariz., GIS group also continually removes splits in the precincts that arise from special district boundaries that overlap irregularly, such as fire, water and school districts. Splits are realigned along obvious existing boundaries, such as city limits or major streets. Reducing splits in a precinct reduces the possible combinations of districts that a resident will belong to and minimizes the number of customized ballots that must be created, which also minimizes election day confusion.

For the presidential preference election this month, the Maricopa County assistant election director and the jurisdictional manager/campaign finance manager used online and printed maps created with GIS to decide which precincts needed to be consolidated for the election. Additionally, GIS helps county officials place polling locations convenient to voters in each of the newly consolidated precincts.

Generating legal descriptions when precinct boundaries changed every two years used to be very time consuming for Maricopa County. Now, a GIS-based redistricting application automatically generates legal descriptions for boundaries in 15 minutes.