The 2018 midterms were historic for the country, and for Harris County especially, with the highest recorded voter turnout for a midterm election. It even surpassed turnout numbers for two out of the last three Presidential elections. Any surge in voter turnout is typically the result of coordinated and sustained grassroots engagement. One of the…
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Michael West, a resident of Jefferson County, Kentucky, received a yellow card in the mail two weeks before Election Day notifying him that his polling place moved to an unfamiliar location. This change meant that he had to travel an additional mile to get to the polls. He believes that this change was enacted to…
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We recently did a webinar with Jamey Caruthers, senior staff attorney at Children At Risk, about how to use data to fight human trafficking. Human trafficking is a huge problem in Texas, especially in Houston, and Children At Risk is leading the charge in helping to write and pass laws that increase penalties for perpetrators while…
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Around the country, there are calls to reform our election process. Activists want to ensure that the outcomes of elections properly reflect the will of the people. Because elections are administered at the local level, this results in experiments in radical democracy in likely and unlikely places. Ranked choice voting is one of those experiments…
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Counting people is vital to our democracy. Every ten years, the US government has a constitutional obligation to conduct a census that counts everyone living in the United States. This count determines how many Congressional representatives each state receives, the levels of Federal funding for state and local governments and federal programs, and serves as…
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Here are some interesting recent stories about maps and data in the Houston area. I hope to make this a monthly roundup post covering areas of public interest, like crime, transportation, real estate, and population health. If you have a good project to share, please let me know! Houston Bike Share Crowdsourcing New Locations The Houston…
Read More This is the second edition of Houston maps and data. This month, we saw Mayor Turner’s first major initiative take the form of an interdepartmental task force and a new website. Potholes in Houston will never be the same again. Here’s the scoop, along with a few other interesting stories about Houston told through maps…
Read More Each month, we round up all the interesting stories told with data that help us understand the Houston region. Houston Public Housing Debate Rages A proposed public housing project at the edge of a fancy Houston neighborhood is causing confusion about the effects of public housing. This article drops some serious data (and a little bit of shaming) to…
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Last year, we helped the City of Houston launch a cost-savings crowdsourcing program called Bright Ideas. I was reading through some of the responses, and I got curious about terminologies, priorities, and the general language used by City of Houston employees. So on April 9, 2016, I grabbed a database dump of the Bright Ideas…
Read More This is our monthly series Houston Maps and Data, where we provide a roundup of interesting Houston stories using maps and data that help us understand the region by the numbers. In mid-April, the Houston area saw unprecedented flooding. There are a lot of attempts to explain why, but before you go down that rabbit…
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