05/08/14: Get with the data

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

RARELY A DAY goes by without an article about the government capturing our data. That information transfer works in only one direction, as Tuesday night’s local election results showed.

Most of the localities holding elections no longer report results on their websites. Instead, they push the information to the State Board of Elections website. That would be fine if that website were updated correctly and fully. It’s not.

There were, once again, problems in reporting results Tuesday evening. It wasn’t until nearly two hours after polls closed that results for Chesapeake and Norfolk began appearing on the site.

There was an alternative for those of us watching Norfolk results. The registrar’s office has continued to provide information on its website as results became available. Every contest in the city had been decided by the time the SBE reported any results.

The Norfolk reporting includes value-added information not found on the SBE website. It shows the number of registered voters in each precinct and the number of ballots cast in each precinct. The percentage of voters who cast ballots — the oft-quoted voter turnout statistic — is also included.

Trying to cobble together this information from the various places on the SBE website is an effort in futility . SBE, which collects registration statistics monthly, hasn’t updated its lists since January. The site shows turnout statistics for November general elections only.

All of which made my quest to compare Norfolk and Chesapeake election results impossible.

SBE shows 59,780 votes and 67,163 votes cast, respectively, in Chesapeake’s council and school board elections. With about 149,000 registered voters — the Chesapeake registrar has a link on its site to the April registration statistics — at first blush, it appears that turnout was about 45 percent.

But that’s not the case. In each contest, voters could choose up to five candidates. A rough estimate of turnout, then, would be closer to 9 percent. That doesn’t take into consideration the number of voters who cast ballots for fewer than five candidates in each race, which often happens. So turnout was likely higher than 9 percent, but we may never know the exact number.

Chesapeake elects its council, school board and mayor at large. Norfolk elects its council members by ward and its mayor at large.

Tuesday’s election in Norfolk was the last in which the mayor will be elected at the same time City Council representatives are picked in the five wards. In two years, the mayor’s office will be on the ballot again, along with the two superwards. The move to realign the election of Norfolk’s mayor was based on the idea that it will increase turnout.

Will it? We already know good candidates and contested races increase turnout. Maybe something else would do it, too — like changing from a ward system to an at-large system. We just don’t have the information to know.

The data is now being collected to figure that out. It would be nice if every locality followed Norfolk’s lead and made its own electoral data readily available to the citizens.