Waterloo Region Votes

Voter information platform for Waterloo Region elections.

🌐 Site: https://waterlooregionvotes.org

Why?

As a citizen in Waterloo Region, it can be a lot of work to try to figure out who's going to be on the ballot for municipal elections. You need to check the regional site, your local ward, and then try to figure out which list of school board trustees applies to you. Each municipality in the region is on a different page. The sites are all linked from wrvotes.com, but it's still a lot of back and forth, and the municipal sites do not list all candidate meetings. Getting to the ballot box fully informed isn't easy. We want to make it easier.

Goals

Encourage greater municipal election participation through candidacy, campaign volunteership and increased voter turnout.

What Are We Building?

1. Consolidated & easy to navigate access to basic candidate information

   • who
   • where
   • links to websites, emails, phone numbers
   • help wanted: find information for candidates that have nothing listed!

2. Inform the community on debates/all candidate meetings for their wards

   • help wanted: monitoring news sites, social media feeds, etc.

3. Easy to navigate resources on who's responsible for what

   • So voters can make an informed choice for each position
   • help wanted: Do you have knowledge or experience in local politics? Can you explain what a school board trustee does?

4. Get out the vote

   • help wanted: promotion, information on how & when to vote, information on how to ensure you're registered, etc.

Tech Stack

• Python
• Ruby
• Bundler
• Jekyll (static site generator)

Contributing

Prerequisites

• Ruby
• Bundler
• Jekyll

Getting Started Locally

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/CivicTechWR/WRvotes.git

2. Install gems:

   bundle install

3. Move into the website directory:

   cd docs

4. Start the local server:

   bundle exec jekyll serve

How Can I Help?

See the Wiki, Issues list, or join the #project_region_vote channel on our Slack: https://civictechwrslack.herokuapp.com/

Or come to one of our meetups!

Status

Historical project (2018-2019) that provided voter information for past Waterloo Region elections. For current civic engagement projects, see our active repositories.

A CivicTechWR community project.