Full article available from Inside Indiana Business by Wes Mills
INDIANAPOLIS – Election Day is one week away and, with early voting underway, some polling places across the Hoosier state may continue to see long lines leading up to November 3.
To help Marion County voters know how long they may have to wait in line, a group of Indiana tech companies has launched a website to help track wait times at the voting booth.
The coalition, IN Tech for Progress, includes employees from Anvl, Lessonly, and Springbuk, all Software-as-a-Service providers.
They partnered with nonprofit organization Vote Safe Indiana, which is advocating for mail-in and no-fault absentee voting.
“We started to talk about mobilizing more folks in the tech community to be politically engaged,” said Roger Deetz, vice president of technology at Springbuk. “Then out of that came the idea of applying technology to help voters be informed with the wait times.”
The website is already operational allowing early voters to track wait times at the six satellite voting locations in Marion County, including the City-County Building.
On Saturday, our partners at WISH-TV reported five to six-hour-long waits at St. Luke’s Methodist Church on the city’s northwest side, while waits at the CCB were closer to two hours long.
“So, when they’re developing their voting plan, they may have a 40-minute drive that takes them out of the way that could save them five hours,” said John Ellis, chief technology officer for Anvl. “Ultimately, how can we give them kind of that ‘Fast Pass’ approach to getting them out to vote?”
Volunteers at polling places are using Anvl’s SaaS platform, which is usually used to monitor safety compliance in construction and manufacturing sites, to capture the data. Another platform, Lessonly, will host the data.
Full article available from Inside Indiana Business by Wes Mills
