Is Better Politics Though The Internet Even Possible?

By vouchey in Miscellaneous on Oct 24, 2005 2:48PM

If you've studied American comparative politics, run for office in Illinois, or looked at a ballot in an Illinois election, you know that our fair state has more bodies of government than any other state. Over 9,000 by one count. That's more than Texas or California.

To help clear things up a bit, the good folks over at the Center for Neighborhood Technology launched Civic Footprint last week. A clean interface that uses freely available governmental boundary files, the site can instantly identify a Chicagoan's congressman, state legislators, county commissioner, alderman and police beat. Neat stuff if you ask us.

According to Ben Helphand from CNT, they'd like to include other municipalities and other levels of government, including suburban park districts, townships, school districts and watersheds. CNT would also like to license the technology. Says Ben, "Down the road we can envision a Civicfootprint/Milwaukee, a Civicfootprint/Detroit, a Civicfootprint/Denver."

Ambitious! And exciting to think that folks could one day easily find all their representative information in one place.

But this isn't a new idea, really. Just one of the cleaner implementations. Project Vote Smart from the League of Women Voters, an independent non-partisan, non-profit research organization, can tell you all your state information. And the U.S. House of Representatives site can find your congressman. Like with Civic Footprint, all of these are based on publically available boundary information in electronic format.

In the private sector, companies like Aristotle and NGP have been working on software like this for some time. What ultimately holds them up from launching a nationally available product are two things: relatively few governmental bodies are organized enough to have electronic boundary files available; and of those that do, each one tends to use a completely different format.

So, let's imagine trying to map out the ninety-nine park districts in Cook County (two in Evanston alone!). That's an easy task since Cook County is relatively organized and uses computers. How about mapping out one of the fastest growing school districts in the state, School District 300 in Carpentersville and Huntley? That district goes through two counties, Kane and McHenry, that both tend to still work from paper records. OK, if real estate agents can find that, so can we. But what about the aldermanic boundaries of the City of McHenry? Now you're getting the picture.

Ultimately the great limitation of technology in American politics is that American politics is so different in so many different parts of the country. Even county to county we have different standards of how often we vote and what we vote for. The result is, that when you're trying to develop technology to ease the political process, you end up discovering that the process doesn't want to be easy. It's hard. Hard to run for office. Hard to understand issues. Hard to figure out where you're supposed to vote.

Chicagoist is glad there's ambitious, bushy-tailed technologists like CNT to work on these things. We just hope they don't give up or run out of money trying to make the political process a little easier.