How do you know which school employees voted?
In the State of Texas, the identity of everyone who works at a public school is considered public information. Similarly, the identity of everyone who is registered to vote is considered public information. We received school data from the Texas Education Agency and voting data from the respective counties. After each day of voting, county elections departments post rosters online with the name, residential address, and poll location of people who voted. Thus, while whom you vote for is private, whether or not and when you vote is public information.
Who are you and why are you doing this?
We are a small non-partisan group based in the Rio Grande Valley. We launched the site in October 2018 and do not get paid for this work. In the past, through Code RGV, we’ve done websites that helped people find their poll and mapped voting patterns in Brownsville (also pro-bono). We have marketing, programming, and data analysis expertise and have decided to use those skills to address the issue of low voter turnout in Texas in a non-partisan way using evidence-based techniques.
Why rankings?
One of the most effective methods to “get-out-the-vote” is to provide voters feedback on how they and their peers compare in terms of turnout. While no one can know who you vote for, whether or not you vote is a matter of public record. And like our high school sports teams, we feel these rankings can provide a healthy competition between schools and encourage school employees to vote.
What is “voter turnout”?
We define voter turnout as the percentage of registered voters who are employed at each school and who have voted. For example, School X has 100 employees. Of those 100, 80 are registered voters. Of those 80, 40 have voted. That means turnout at School X is 50%.
Why is my school not listed?
We did not include schools with 10 or fewer registered voters.
We did not include schools with 10 or fewer registered voters.
Charter school districts are more complicated because many of them are statewide. Since the Texas Education Agency does not record the campus name for auxiliary personnel, and because we only have voter data for a few counties, we cannot accurately rank these districts. In addition, some charter school districts record the address of their campuses as the address of the regional or main headquarters, which makes matching to county data more difficult.