Project: Election Administration and Voting Survey

Voting precinct data table

🗳️ This project works with the U.S. Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) data to support research and analysis for public-interest groups.

Why This Matters

Election administration data can reveal patterns that may point to administrative issues, data quality problems, or practices that warrant further review. The U.S. Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) provides detailed information on how elections are run across states and counties—covering voter registration, mail ballots, provisional ballots, voter list maintenance, and more. Making this data easier to clean, compare, and analyze across jurisdictions and over time can support research, oversight, advocacy, and other public-interest work.

Our Impact

By making EAVS data easier to clean, analyze, and compare across time and geography, this project supports election officials, researchers, advocacy organizations, legal teams, journalists, public-interest organizations to identify patterns that may warrant further investigation. The work aims to lower barriers to using election administration data and to enable more consistent, transparent, and scalable analysis.

What We're Building

The EAVS project is building a reproducible, open workflow to make election administration data easier to use. Current work includes:

  • A Python-based data pipeline to clean and standardize EAVS datasets
  • Cleaned datasets for 2020, 2022, and 2024, along with combined multi-year outputs
  • Time-series data to support analysis across election cycles
  • Data enrichment with demographic and jurisdictional information (e.g., Census-based data)
  • Analysis-ready datasets designed for dashboards and further investigation

The goal is to reduce the time and effort required to work with EAVS data and to make analyses more transparent, reproducible, and scalable.

Current Project Status

The project is currently in a mid-to-late stage of development, with strong foundations in place and ongoing work in several areas.

  • Core datasets for 2020, 2022, and 2024 have been cleaned and standardized
  • Combined multi-year datasets and time-series outputs have been created
  • Demographic enrichment has been partially integrated
  • Dashboard development and analysis concepts are in progress
  • The team is actively engaging in outreach and user discovery to ensure the work aligns with real-world needs

The focus now is on refining the pipeline, expanding analysis and visualization, and working with potential users to guide further development.

Our Story

The EAVS dataset is rich but not user-friendly. Working with it often requires identifying relevant variables across multiple files and codebooks, cleaning and standardizing inconsistent formats, calculating key metrics, and comparing results across years and jurisdictions. In practice, this has often meant manual, spreadsheet-based workflows that are time-consuming, difficult to reproduce, and prone to error.

Civic Tech DC volunteers began this project to make EAVS data more accessible and usable. Early work focused on understanding how Campaign Legal Center was working with the data and where the biggest bottlenecks existed. The project has since evolved into building a reusable, multi-year data pipeline and supporting tools to enable more reliable and scalable analysis.

How the Project Is Organised

The project is organized into five areas:

  • Data Cleaning / Pipeline (Python) – cleaning and standardizing datasets, building reproducible workflows
  • Dashboard (Tableau) – developing visualizations and user-facing tools
  • Analysis / Insights – exploring data, identifying patterns, and generating findings
  • Outreach – connecting with potential users and partners to understand needs and use cases
  • Project Management – coordinating tasks, documentation, and team processes

Volunteers are welcome to contribute to one or more areas depending on their interests and experience.

đź‘‹ Come Join Us

We welcome volunteers with a range of skills and interests. Current needs include:

  • Python / Data Pipeline – cleaning and standardizing datasets, improving and extending the pipeline
  • Tableau / Dashboarding – building and refining visualizations (experienced Tableau users especially welcome)
  • Analysis / Insights – conducting quality checks, exploratory analysis, and identifying meaningful patterns
  • Outreach – identifying and connecting with potential users of the work
  • Project Management and Coordination – supporting organization, onboarding, and communication

The project is coordinated through the Civic Tech DC Slack workspace and during in-person project nights on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month. Work is largely asynchronous between meetings.

To get involved, join the Slack workspace. Once there, look for the #eavs_clc channel, where we share updates, tasks, questions, and resources.

If you are interested in potentially contributing now or later, please also fill out the EAVS Volunteer Matchmaker Survey. Completing the survey is not a commitment to volunteer; it simply helps us understand your interests, skills, and availability as the project evolves.

💬 Slack (#eavs_clc) 🧩 GitHub Repo