Ballot Collection Guides & Drupal Guidance
Voter suppression is a major issue in American elections. The US Vote Foundation develops and provides online tools to assist US citizens living anywhere in the world to register to vote and request their absentee ballot using their state's specific voter forms. The foundation's mission is to simplify the process of registering to vote and help voters stay active in the electoral process.
I have been volunteering in the Civic Data and Election Services Program since March of 2020. I work in the back end, simplifying the Drupal Content Management System interface to help fellow volunteers enter data. I build front-facing pages when there is a short deadline or stubborn issue and act as a consultant to the organization's founder, Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, on technical matters. I built them a custom API and interface to calculate election date and deadlines across all 50 states and additional United States territories.
The US Postal Service struggled to get ballots returned in time for the 2020 election. I worked with the US Vote Foundation to build pages that showed voters their state's alternative ballot return options and offered helpful resources.
I built the static template for this page, then used the foundation's Drupal site to display the information. I was able to save the foundation money by building the page independent of their paid external developers. When there were elements that I could not access (due to that company having the source code), I would write out the code in Chrome Developer Tools and send it to their team.
The client needed an intuitive tool to calculate the election dates and deadlines in all 50 US states and additional territories. Their current methods were prone to frequent user error, even with experienced and focused volunteers. I used Amazon AWS Amplify, with DynamoDB and GraphQL to build them a custom API that holds their current state election laws. Using that API, I built a calculator for these deadlines so the volunteers could input a state and election date, and the single-page application would output election dates for each individual deadline type (there are typically 10 per state).
It was my first time working with AWS, GraphQL and DynamoDB, but I took on the task of teaching myself because I felt that they were the best fit for the project. The information is translated from Excel spreadsheets to JSON, and the JSON is pushed into the DynamoDB database with React scripts and GraphQL.
With the Georgia 2020 presidential election resulting in a Senate runoff election, the foundation needed a fact sheet fast. There were several styling issues with printable materials and they could not figure out how to help users download their files.
I quickly built a static template for the page, filled in the content and styled the tables. I taught volunteers my methods with screenshots and detailed steps so that they could use my methods in the future.
I work with the foundation's volunteer team to correct styling issues on their back end page structures. I show them how to display tables using Drupal's rich text editor, as it has a bit of a learning curve when working with tables. I have experience working with Drupal and PHP in my NIH work, so I customize the foundation's Drupal back end to make things smoother for the data entry volunteers.
When pages need a new type of input or image, I'll set up the structure so volunteers without technical experience can enter data more efficiently.
In 2019, I was learning multiple graphing libraries and trying to find large data sources to experiment with. I knew that US Vote Foundation had a comprehensive API but it wasn't publicly available. I reached out to see if I could convince them to give me a key but was surprised to be put in touch with the founder, Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat.
Susan asked if I would be interested in working with the foundation as a volunteer analyst and consultant. They had difficulties finding developers as volunteers, so she agreed to give me access to the API if I would fix Drupal issues for them. I was thrilled to be able to join the organization and have been volunteering for them ever since.
Working to help fight against voter suppression in the 2020 election was one of the most meaningful things I've done in my career. I'm extremely proud of the work I've done at the foundation. I'm looking forward to continuing my work in technology for social impact and am thrilled to continue offering my services to US Vote into 2021.