{"id":6587,"date":"2016-03-01T06:30:31","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T14:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.esri.com\/?p=6587"},"modified":"2016-03-01T06:30:31","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T14:30:31","slug":"whereabouts-and-the-elections","status":"publish","type":"insider","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/insider\/whereabouts-and-the-elections","title":{"rendered":"Whereabouts and the Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

In looking back on the last month, two items have occupied my thoughts, our whereabouts, and the upcoming elections. These two items may seem unconnected, dissimilar, or even odd, but I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that we don\u2019t think about them enough, together.
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\nWhereabouts to Placemaking<\/strong>
\nWhereabouts: There is much talk today about getting people interested in and, in general, persuading people to consider and think about their whereabouts. Their whereabouts at home, at work, and as they are out-and-about in their community, living their lives.
\nThe term placemaking is an overarching idea for improving one\u2019s neighborhood, community, or city. To be heavy-handed, it is trying to reinvent how people can make their place in the community. Placemaking compels us to consider, in our civic interactions, our whereabouts; our places occupied by, our home, our neighborhood, and our community where we live with our fellow citizens.
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Collin County, Texas is helping voters find polling stations with the shortest wait times using Esri\u2019s Polling Locator template applications with updates from Esri partner GISi. Part of the ArcGIS for Local Government solution, this application allows voting citizens in the County to locate the most convenient polling place in their area.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn addition, all of this thinking about one\u2019s whereabouts is presented in a frame of collaborative and hands-on processes. Location, or location analysis, is how businesses think about our whereabouts. Businesses today put a lot of effort into collecting, storing, and analyzing the whereabouts (location) of their customers. I\u2019ve heard that as much as 85% of the apps in the iTunes and Android App stores have location features either explicitly (Family Sharing features) or inherent (location aware) in their functions. This is a lot of attention on one\u2019s whereabouts.
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\nLocation and Elections<\/strong>
\nThe Elections: Watching and reading the news, one cannot avoid stories about the election and our civic duty to vote. I see articles about the problems with voter turnout, apathy of the minority and youth voter, and the processes states create to make registration easy and available to all.
\nEach voter must ultimately know, and vote for, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, State Senators, and Representatives, Assemblymen, or Delegates. In addition, some states have other elected officials like Attorney Generals or Comptrollers. Then there’s local officials elected at the level of counties, cities, towns, villages, the list goes on. That makes an estimated 500,000-elected office-holders. By the way, we vote for these officials through our local precincts and there are just under 180,000 of them. How\u2019s that for whereabouts?
\nSo here\u2019s the connection:<\/p>\n