February 5, 2008
Political Science Department
In Which I Show Total Confidence in Local Democracy
If I get time tomorrow, I'm going to visit a few polling places to talk to people and take pictures for the Chi-Town Daily News. I know where I have to vote, but I haven't got a clue where to find other polling places in the neighborhood.
The first place I thought to look is the Illinois State Board of Elections web site. Let's see, there are sections on Campaign Disclosure, Election Information, Voting Information---ah hah! That must be it.
There's a voter information pamplet, adopted and proposed rulemaking, a humorous video on why to vote---okay, I gotta see what counts as humor by Board of Elections standards. Buffering...buffering...buffering..."Terry S. Vermin has been re-elected. Oh no! Quick! To the Time Machine!"...buffering...buffering...buffering...sigh. I have a 3Mb connection. It's about what you'd expect. See for yourself.
Anyway, there are links for district boundaries, voting systems, election authorities, and a history of polling place accessibility. Nothing about where to vote under Voter Information. Let's look around some more...Aha, there's a link to something called the Illinois Voters Guide.
Oh, well, that's not good.
(It was at this point that I realized I had the makings of a blog entry.)
So I backed up and followed the Election Authorities link and then clicked through to the Cook Country Clerk's Office and found a page that will find your polling place. But it doesn't have what I need.
I know what's going on here. If I complained to the Illinois Board of Elections, someone there would tell me it's not their job to keep track of polling places. That makes it seem like they're just being obstructionist jerks, but it's not really that. I just haven't found the right unit of government yet. They're still delivering terrible customer service, but they just don't see it as their problem to point me to the right place.
Anyway, just for the fun of it, I type my address into the Cook County Clerk's form for finding polling locations, and sure enough, I get an error message:
No Information Found
No information was found for the information submitted.
Note that this service is FOR SUBURBAN COOK COUNTY VOTERS ONLY.
Obviously, even though Chicago is entirely in Cook County, it has its own web site. Not surprisingly, there's no link.
So now it's off to the City of Chicago web site. It would be nice to see a link or a little content box about the election on the front page, but there's nothing. The city web portal is a soulless, spirit-crushing, content-managed monstrosity that seems to be designed to prevent any city department from posting anything interesting or relevant. It's pretty obvious that some pages are never maintained.
As I'm steeling myself to poke around in the twisty maze of links, I get another idea. I back up to the list of Election Authorities and...yes, they have a link for the City of Chicago. I note that the builders of this page have bought a new domain rather than try to use the city's main portal. Maybe it will have something useful.
I click on "Voters", then "Find your polling place" and get to a form which I fill out with my address. It finds me, and it has the right polling place.
Even better, it also has a PDF of all the polling places in the city. Score!
There are dozens of polling places in my ward alone, but now at least I can find them.
That was the hard way to get that information, but I was curious how hard it would be. Now let me try the easy way. I type "where do i vote in chicago" into Google and click the "I Feel Lucky" button and Bam! Right to the Chicago elections page.
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