Our Orange County project

It’s been a busy few weeks here in California for election geeks, specifically for our research group at Caltech. We’ve launched a pilot test of an election integrity project, in collaboration with Orange County, where we have been using the recent primary here in California to test various methodologies for helping evaluate election administration.

At this point, our goal is to work closely with the Orange County Registrar of Voters to understand what evaluative tools they believe are most helpful to them, and to also determine what sorts of data we can readily obtain during the period immediately before and after a major statewide election.

We recently launched a website that describes the project, and where we are building a dashboard that summarizes the various research products as we produce them.

The website is Monitoring the Election, and if you navigate there you’ll see descriptions of the goals of this project, and some of the preliminary analytics we have produced regarding the June 5, 2018 primary in Orange County. At present, the dashboard has a visualization of the Twitter data we are collecting, an analysis of vote by mail ballot mailing and return, and our observations of early voting in Orange County. In the next day or two we will add some first-pass post-election forensics, a preliminary report on our election day observations, and an observation report regarding the risk-limiting audit that OCRV will conduct early this week.

Again, the project is in pilot phase. We will be evaluating these various analytic tools over the summer, and we will determine which we can produce quickly for the November 2018 general election in Orange County.

Stay tuned!