Detours in Election Technology: The “Open” Factor and Mobility

In a recent posting, I recalled the old-fashioned traditional proprietary-IT-think of vendors leveraging their proprietary data for their customers, and contrasted that with election technology where the data is public.

In the “open data” approach, you do not need to have integrated reporting features as part of a voting system or election management system. Instead, you can choose your own reporting system, hook it up to your open database of election data, and mine that data for whatever reports you want. And if you need help, only a few days of a reporting-systems consultant can get you set up quite quickly. The same applies to what we used to call “ad hoc querying” in the olden enterprise IT days, and now might be “data mining”. Well, every report is the result doing one or more database queries, and formatting the results. When you can do ad hoc creation of new report template, then an ad hoc query is really just a new report. With the open-data approach, there is no need to buy any additional “modules” from a voting system vendor in order to be able to do querying, reporting, or data mining. Instead, you have ready access to the data with whatever purpose-built tools you choose.

Today, I want to underline that point as applied to mobility, that is, the use of apps on mobile devices (tablets, smart phones, etc.) to access useful information in a quick and handy on-the-go small-screen form factor.  Nowadays, lots of folks want “an app for that” and election officials would like to be able to provide. But the options are not so good. A proprietary system vendor may have an app, but it might not be what you had in mind; and you can’t alter it. You might get a friendly government System Integrator to crack open your proprietary voting system data and write some apps for you, but that is not a cheap route, either.

What, in contrast, is the open route? It might seem a detour to get you where you want to go, but consider this. With open data, there is no constraint on how you use it, or what you use it with. If you use an election management system that has a Web services API, you can publish all that data to the whole world in a way that anyone’s software can access it– including mobile apps– including all the data, not just what happens to be available in proprietary product’s Web interface. That’s not just open-source and “open data” but also “complete data.”

Then for some basic apps, you can get friendly open-gov techies to make something simple but effective for starters, and make the app open source. From there on out, it is up to the ingenuity of the tens of thousands of mobile app tinkerers and good government groups (for an example, read about one of them here, and then try it the app yourself) to come up great ideas about how to present the data — and the more options there are, the more election data, the public’s data, gets used for the public good.

I hope that that picture sounds more appealing than closed systems. But to re-wind to Proprietary Election Technology Vendors’ (PETV) offerings to Local Election Officials (LEO), consider this dialogue as the alternative to “open data, complete data.”

LEO: I’d like to get an election data management solution with flexible reporting, ad hoc querying, a management dashboard, a nifty graphical public Web interface, and some mobile apps.

PETV: Sure, we can provide it. We have most of that off the shelf, and we can do some customization work and professional services to tailor it to your needs. Just guessing from you asked for, that will be $X for the software license, $Y per year for support, $Z for the customization work, and we’ll need to talk about yearly support for the custom stuff.

LEO: Hmmm. Too much for me. Bummer.

PETV: Well, maybe we can cut you a special deal, especially if you lower your sights on that customization stuff.

LEO: Hmmm. Then I’m not really getting all I asked for, but I am getting something I can afford. … But will you all crack open your product’s database with a Web services API so that anybody can write a mobile app for it, for any mobile device in the world?

PETV: Wow! That would be some major customization. I think you’ll find our mobile app is just fine.

LEO: What about cracking open the database so I can use my choice of reporting tools?

PETV: Ah, no, actually, and I think you’ll find our reporting features are really great.

I’ll stop the dialogue (now getting painful to listen to) and actually stop altogether for today, leaving the reader to contrast it with the open-data, complete-data approach of an open election data management system with core functions and features, basic reporting, basic mobility, and above all the open-ness for anyone to data-mine or mobilize the election data that is, in fact, the people’s information.

— EJS