Philadelphia - The Casino Vote - May 15
27,000 Philadelphians signed a petition calling for a vote on whether to have a 1500 foot buffer zone between casinos and homes, schools and places of worship. The Philadelphia City Council voted unanimously to place this referendum, Question #1, on the May 15th ballot.
The state Supreme Court has denied our right to vote on the casino buffer zone. On Election Day, we're holding our own election so that Philadelphians will be able to vote on Question # 1 on May 15th.
May 15 - You Can Vote
1) Online
2) By phone - 215-925-6380
3) By ballox box - voter boxes around the city.
I'm programming the interface to validate voters. We try to match people who vote to the list of Philadelphia registered voters (almost 1 million people) to ensure a fair vote.
- Login to post comments
Results
http://www.casinofreephila.org/results
I was especially happy that the system worked with very few kinks on election day. So I spent most of my time sitting around at the election office headquarters not having to fix problems, but being ready just in case they arose.
We had decent turnover and counted over 13,000 votes. The phone lines were really busy most of the day. The one unfortunate part is that a LOT of people move and don't update their address in the voter registration database... so we weren't able to count their votes. (I wonder if this is one of the bigger problems for regular elections as well?)
I'm going to release the software as open source in several days, assuming the project gets approved by the sourceforge.net site project approvers.