Projects to Know About: A Brief Introduction to the OpenElections Database Project

The OpenElections Project is working to build a standardized, linked database of certified election results for federal and state offices.
It’s a project that might be of interest to many members of the library community. In fact, some of you might even be able to lend a helping hand. For example, see the Wikipedia page linked at the bottom of this post.
The project just received $200,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation.
From the Nieman Journalism Lab:

Senior developers from The New York Times and The Washington Post are looking for volunteers to help collect more than 10 years of federal elections data from each state. With their help — and $200,000 in Knight News Challenge funding — Serdar Tumgoren and Derek Willis are working on creating a free, comprehensive source of official U.S. election results.
The goal is to end up with electoral data that can then be linked to different types of data sets — campaign finance, voter demographics, legislative histories, and so on — in ways that previously haven’t been possible on this scale.

Read the Complete Article
Direct to the OpenElections Web Site
Lead developers, Derek Willis and Serdar Tumgoren can be contacted via Twitter.
See Also: OpenElection Project Twitter Stream
See Also: A Growing List of Official Election Data Sources (By State, via Wikipedia)

Filed under: Data Files, Funding, Libraries, News