Election Day is In:
A privacy-preserving voter information lookup tool for Kent County Michigan residents without any tracking or logs. 100% free open source, all the data is already loaded to your device by visiting this page. How?
Privacy by design
This is a tool that calculates your precinct polling place and the directions to get there entirely in your web browser.
We stitched together public data from the state, city and county, then created a routing engine so everything runs on your device, rather than on a server. Once you load the page, the data files get loaded too. When you search, the results are delivered without making any network requests, so anything you look up is 100% anonymous. Once the page is loaded, you can even disconnect from the internet and query locations.
We also give directions that optionally avoid known license plate cameras. Those camera locations come from OpenStreetMap, where much of the plate reader mapping is the work of DeFlock volunteers.
The state's Michigan Voter Information Center is accurate and it is the official source, but it asks for your name, your birth month and year and your ZIP code before it will show you your ward and precinct, and every lookup runs on its servers. The notice you agree to on that form says, in full:
The information collected on this form is only what is needed to complete your transaction as authorized by MCL 168.509ii, MCL 168.759, MCL 168.759a, and MCL 168.764c. As a public body, MDOS is subject to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), MCL 15.231 et seq., and information such as a name or address may be disclosed in response to a FOIA request.
This site is a proof of concept that none of that has to happen. Nothing about your registration technically needs to be processed on the state's servers to show you where you vote, and the state does not need to learn that you looked. Your voter record is already a public record, disclosable under FOIA whether or not you ever agree to that notice. Between the way that form is built and what the notice says, asking where you vote could create a second record: that you, from this address, on this day, looked yourself up. Whether that record is disclosable is a separate question. Query logs are data, and if collecting them is not necessary, why collect them? This site loads everything on your device, so there are no query logs of any kind that could identify you.
Driving to take part in a constitutionally protected activity should be free of surveillance. Automated license plate readers on traffic signals and utility poles track every passing vehicle, and can alert an officer in real time when one of them is flagged. Nobody should have a reason to feel uneasy about being tracked on the way to vote. Being pulled over because a camera read your plate is unlikely for most people, and it is a real possibility all the same, false positives included. So the directions here lead to your polling place, an early voting site or a ballot drop box by a route that goes around the cameras this project knows about, and where every route passes one, it says so and takes the way that passes the fewest.
The code is open source and in the public domain, under the Unlicense. Take it from GitHub, copy it, host it, change it, with or without credit, a clerk's office that would rather run its own included. Two pieces ship alongside it and keep their own free licences, the Leaflet map library under BSD 2-Clause and the Hanken Grotesk typeface under the SIL Open Font License.
The data is a different matter, because it is not ours to license and the terms are not the same for all of it. Precinct boundaries, streets, addresses, polling places and drop boxes are public records of the State of Michigan, Kent County and the city and township clerks, passed along here as they were published. The plate reader locations, the turn restrictions the routing follows, and the water and parks drawn on the map come from OpenStreetMap and carry the ODbL, which asks anyone reusing them to credit OpenStreetMap and to share what they build alike. Every data file in the repository records where it came from and on what terms.
An open source project of Cantica Systems.