Greenwich residents and political junkies can now slice and dice Greenwich voter data online.
Greenwich voter data has been uploaded into a business intelligence tool which allows for on-demand analysis.
“For many years we’ve been emailing and faxing voters a basic document which has party registration figures as divided by voting district. My work in the private sector made me realize we could provide more advanced data and visualizations online which would be available on-demand to anyone interested,” said Fred DeCaro III, Registrar of Voters (R).
DeCaro said he was already generating voter lists for the online lookup tool which allows voters to check their voter registration. Why not use this same data to generate statistics?
At the suggestion of Town of Greenwich IT Director Tom Klein, DeCaro worked with Jake Ellis in the IT Department and a free version of the business intelligence tool, Tableau, to create the visualizations. “It was really all Jake,” said DeCaro. He took my basic sketches and built the tables and graphs. Now I have to do is periodically update the data.”
The tables and graphs can be found from the “Voter Statistics” link on the Registrar of Voter’s website at greenwichct.org/vote.
Because the charts are interactive, clicking on any portion will drill down to provide additional information specific to that demographic segment. For instance, using the graphs provided, one can drill down to answer questions as specific as:
- How many Republican voters are between the ages 30-39?
- How many Democratic male voters are under 25 years old?
- Which voting District is the smallest? Which is the largest?
- How many female voters are there across the town who are unaffiliated with a party? What about just District 1?
To jumpstart usage, DeCaro produced a video tutorial to show users exactly what to click on to answer those sample questions.
Democratic Registrar Michael Aurelia said he was excited to be able to offer this new tool on the web.
“We get a wide variety of requests for information,” Aurelia said. “This new tool will relieve us from numerous requests for data, and provides information even when the office is closed.”
To try slicing and dicing the data for yourself, go to greenwichct.org/vote and click on “Voter Statistics.”
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