While Riverside has used some form of GIS for portions of elections management since the 1990s, it wasn’t until 2010 that the county started moving towards fully geo-enabling their elections. Since that time, the Registrar of Voters GIS staff have worked to develop advanced functionality that ensures a high level of voter placement accuracy.
Key among the new applications is the Voter Mapping Model, which converts assessor data into entries used for voter mapping and address verification. As part of their close collaboration with the assessor’s office, the Riverside County’s Registrar of Voters GIS team enjoys a live link to the assessor’s office’s GIS system.
At least weekly, county staff add new voters to the voter registration system, as well as run checks to identify voters who may have been misprecincted, so that those can be researched and corrected. The team also uses an application that helps spot inaccurate or incomplete addresses, in order to avoid sending out undeliverable ballots during elections.
While the focus of Riverside’s work with GIS has been on ensuring voters are assigned to the right districts and receive accurate ballots, staff have also created voter-facing tools, such as an application that allows voters to locate and get directions to their assigned voting location.
Finally, the case study also discusses the steps the county takes to ensure they are being kept informed about changes to voting districts. To read the full case study, click here.
For more background on NSGIC’s Geo-Enabled Elections project, click here, or, to access the project’s Best Practices Guidance for GIS in elections, follow this link.