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Graduate students from Public Policy, Information Systems and Computer Science are helping voters in Maryland get important information through an innovative new Web site, the Maryland Voter Information Clearinghouse (mdelections.umbc.edu). Working with UMBC’s National Center for the Study of Elections (NCSE) under contract with the Maryland State Board of Elections, the students helped develop state-of-the art Web based tools that provide information about the 2006 Maryland Primary and General Elections. NCSE is a research center within the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research. Donald Norris, Professor of Public Policy is NCSE’s director, and Andrew Sears, Chair and Professor of Information Systems, is associate director.

The Web site has easily searchable databases of information on campaign finances, candidates for office, and voter registration, with data provided through the State Board of Elections. Visitors to the site can search publicly available reports on campaign finance activity for all candidates, political action committees, and parties, as well as find information on candidates for federal and state offices. Registered voters, after entering required information, can verify their voter registration information, learn their voting districts, find their polling places, and see a sample ballot.

The project provided both opportunities and challenges for the team, according to Aryya Gangopadhyay, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for Information Systems. Dr. Gangopadhyay supervised development of all the three applications as well as the data management aspects of the project. “The project had a very quick turn around time and was very sensitive because of its high visibility. It had some unusual characteristics, such as regular and continuous updates of the database, which have to be synchronized with the Board of Elections. It was important to tune its performance, which was tricky because of frequent reloads. We also managed to have a near zero downtime.” “The project helped me understand how to design a Web application with performance considerations, as the voter registration application involved handling almost 3.4 million records,” observed Amol Dawalbhakta, a master’s student in Computer Science, who worked on the registered voter look up application. In order for Quyin Fan, a Ph.D. student in Information Systems, to work on the complex campaign finance application, she had to become familiar with Maryland campaign finance rules. “To get the right queries, I had to fully understand not only the database, but also those political terms and procedures,” she said.

The applications also have to allow interface with end users. “The candidate database, with information on more than 650 candidates for office, is quite unique in that there is a high degree of interaction with the candidates, who can add their profiles and pictures to the database themselves,” noted Dr. Gangopadhyay. Shibnath Mukherjee, a Ph.D. student in Information Systems, also worked on the candidate application.

To ensure that the site was user-friendly, the project team held detailed discussions with experts such as political reporters who rely on the campaign finance reports for their campaign stories, and public interest groups such as the League of Women Voters and Common Cause. “In a sense, we’re trying to serve two masters,” said Public Policy Ph.D. student Evan Perlman. Perlman worked on the project and responds to voter and candidate inquiries about the site. “On one hand, there are the experienced users, the reporters and activists, who expect to find a depth of information and a powerful search; on the other hand we had to be mindful of citizens who only want to find their voting place or see how much their favorite candidate has raised.”

The site has been receiving positive feedback. For example, the Washington Post included the Web site in its county voter guides, and called the databases “nifty” and “quick and easy to follow” in a recent article.

The project team is continuing work on the Web site. By 2010, they plan to extend the candidate look up to include county races, offering information on 2,000 or more candidates.

“This is very exciting,” says Perlman. “We have the chance to bring the public into the election process in a way that very few other states are seriously doing. It’s nice to be at the cutting edge of this.”