Why have I created this dashboard?

Answer:

        1.    To provide myself and anyone else interested perspective of how engaged my community is with local elections.

        2.    To provide a tool to drive voter turnout.       

        Primarily, I think it was to give myself a sense of information fidelity-- and potentially bring together people who value trust-worthy information-- to then have civil conversation, and reasoned decision-making, about local elections.  The effort I put into this gives me a basis to talk more confidently about local politics.

Getting and Organizing the Data:

        Initially I reached out to Winnebago County Clerk for voter turnout data.  She provided me some spreadsheets going back to the 1990's!  This data allowed me to drive down to precinct or reporting unit level.  That was OK for me-- I mean I hadn't seen voter turnout statistics about Neenah Wards 1 through 4 before-- but I wanted to get it more narrowly:  I wanted to understand voter turnout by the ward.

        To do that I was recommended to go see my City Clerk.  

            Unfortunately, my eagerness to discuss with the City Clerk about my intent to get ward-level turnout data was misinterpreted as impatience and rudeness.  If anyone reads this and recognizes the incident I'm referring: I'm sorry we started off on such a bad foot 🤝 (I hope you can forgive me).  

        In any case, my FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the City Clerk for the data was fulfilled by providing a hitherto unknown-to-me link at https://badgervoters.wi.gov/.  

        At that website I was able to download voter role data in Wisconsin, or a subset of Wisconsin.  In early April of 2025 I purchased the active voter role data from https://badgervoters.wi.gov/ for the City of Neenah for $110.  With this data I executed some transformations to reshape the data so that it would be easier to work with in Tableau, the data visualization tool I prefer.  Then I went to work formatting it into the dashboard you've seen.  

Design Decisions of Noteworthiness:

        For the published version, I removed any ability to view voter's names, phone numbers, emails or voter IDs.  You can kind of back into that information if you're eager enough though simply by drilling all the way to the house number;  By fanning out the bar chart of turnout by ward (it's like a pivot table that can be expanded if you can find the little [+] icon) you can see the voter turnout by household, and then some cursory internet research should lead you to who most likely the active voter in that residence was at the time of the data download/refresh.  

        Are you perturbed-- annoyed-- angry-- uncomfortable with me publishing your household's voting record date so transparently?  I'm sorry you feel that way, but before you target your hostility at me for this sensed invasion-of-privacy, hear me out:  

        For ~$14K anyone can buy the State of Wisconsin voter role like I bought the City of Neenah's for $110.  I'll say that $14K is a lot of money to me, but it isn't to everyone.   A monied person or organization motivated to influence elections across the state wouldn't flinch to spend $14K if it meaningfully informed their efforts.  

        While I don't consider myself monied ($14K is a lot to me!), I spent $110 for this data, and transparently it was motivated by my curiosity to understand the 'health' of my locality's democracy.  I publish this data, while snipping out your phone number, email address and names, to provide us neighbors the same information-- power-- as those monied interests.    

        I want my neighbors to find that this is trustworthy, and convenient, to get into local election information.  I welcome my ballot neighbors feedback on how this project could be improved.

Tool for Driving Voter Engagement:  Expose Information Sufficiency Challenges

        To be clear, I have not been a particularly active voter (you can find me on the dashboard and see how lowly my turnout ranks compared to my neighbors) in local elections.  I've lived assuming local elected positions would be sought by people who cared and were knowledgeable, and the people voting for them would care and be knowledgeable, so a decent outcome would be reached where local positions would be filled by knowledgeable and caring people.  I have also been encouraged, that to make significant impact, you had to be politically engaged locally.  But my assumption articulated in the previous sentence continued to hold enough sway to keep me blissfully politically disengaged.

        For one reason or another, I finally confronted that assumption and rolled up my sleeves to become an informed voter.  Yet, I found it difficult to collect information about local candidates and local elections.  Whereas my US President, US Senators and US Representative had a glut of information available on the internet of varying veracity; information about my school board, city council or county seats were almost nonexistent.  The information landscape to know my candidates required time (traveling to candidate meet and greets), determination (how many rabbit holes into facebook and local news sites can I go down before I find a mention of a school board candidate?) and connections (since they're so local, I could find a friend to introduce me).  That is a lot to ask of an engaged voter, but for the disengaged...

Disengaged Voters

        As a formerly disengaged voter, maybe I would have seen somebody's last name on a sign in somebody's yard.  Maybe it would have told me the office (School Board), and maybe there would be a few descriptions that the candidate hoped will stick with me (e.g "Advocating for Students" or "Detail Oriented").  Unfortunately, there would never be anything in a sign that would convince me that this person cares about things I care about and is knowledgeable to make them effective in the given office.  This, to me, seems unhealthy.  Our disengaged voters are caught in the following binary:

        Disengaged voters are insufficiently-informed of our candidates so we vote sub-optimally.

        Or

        Disengaged voters are insufficiently-informed of our candidates so we don't vote. 

        

Engaged Voters

        But I don't think the problem ends there, because even me (I'm identifying now as an 'engaged voter') is challenged.  Earlier I outlined an engaged voter as someone who cares and is knowledgeable.  I'll address 'care' in another blog post, but when it comes to knowledge; I would argue that most of us (engaged voters) are less-knowledgeable than we think we are.  This is because information is insufficient; I find it hard to believe that a significant fraction of the voting populace spends the time and energy to inform themselves fully on the candidates, each of their principals/values, their experience to make a decision.  Instead, I suspect that there is heavy use of heuristics for being informed about a candidate that goes into the decision:

        --Have I heard of the candidate personally-- even through acquaintance-- such that I see them as part of my group?  Maybe in Church, or a club or something.

        --Do I have a friend or family member that is highly engaged in local politics who can tell me who I should vote for?

        --Do I just check in on what a given facebook group is saying to get my vibes for who I should vote for?

        --How much does a political party's endorsement influence my decision to vote for someone?         

        In either case, insufficient information (resulting in disengagement or use of heuristics) impedes a healthy democratic process. 

Tool for Driving Voter Engagement:  Canvassing

With that conclusion, I wondered...

            --How do my neighbors get information about local candidates?

            --What information would they like to have about local candidates?

            --As a politically active neighbor, I have energy and motivation to "be in the room", so could I bring back useful information/observations?

        School Board Elections seems like the best, and most personally relevant, place to see whether I could improve democratic health in my locality.  I say it is the best because School Board Elections never share a ballot with presidential elections;  presidential elections already have enough money and attention to bring in low-engaged voters.  School Board Elections provide a better opportunity to see whether my efforts are meaningful in the least. So I embark on a data-driven effort to improve voter turnout as a kind of measure of democratic health.

        When I canvass, I would like to understand the information economy around local elections:  "How are we currently served information?"  "What information are we currently served?" and  "What and how could/would we be better served?"  and...  "Can I serve you better?"

        And then, I take that feedback, and I'll have to deliver to that last question to earn their trust.  And that trust, which dovetails with all of us being better informed voters, results in improved voter turnout.  The data will speak about whether improvement was made.