Investigate using Google Civic Information API

[ddfridley]

Google has a civic information api where you can get information about current election across the country.

Investigate whether we could use that for future elections, to cover more elections than we already have with Ballotpedia.

When I last looked, they didn't have much information about upcoming elections, but now they the general election is upon us, we should do a study.

How many 'elections' do they have info on? Election is confused word - but I mean how many offices are there with candidates running in them. Sometimes election has a broad definition - like we have an election in November - but that sounds like one but there are many many offices with candidates running.

How many candidates in those elections have email address? We use email addresses to contact the candidates to send them recorder links?

How many elections do they have by district type - like federal, state, city, county, etc.

https://developers.google.com/civic-information and specifically https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/elections

This work should be done in node - as we will eventually integrate it into the undebate server. But for this investigation it can just run locally - it doesn't have to run on heroku (or the cloud).

Extra: Can we read in all the info - across the country, and store it in a Mongo database - so that we can test with it, even after the elections are over.

Extra: Can figure out the overlap between what google has, and what we have in our mongo db, and figure out what additional google has?

[shinjonathan]

@ddfridley do you have a spot where I can take a look at the dataset currently in mongo?

Reading the emails and through their documentation and checking what's currently served over their API... it looks like we will need to take a look at what this API provides closer to election day.

The elections provided over the API currently only provides voter registration information currently.

It looks like the data provided over this API is best used for upcoming election dates and polling locations.