Build open source tools and provide carefully crafted analytics services for municipalities and advocacy groups.

Our Tools

Our equitable poll placement tool measures demographic inequities in access to polls and recommends new constellations (legally compliant with state and local laws) of locations to improve access. 

Sample Reports and Publications

Sample Reports:

• Gwinnett County wanted to change the location of one early voting location, and add an extra for 2024. There were various competing considerations for candidate locations, leading us to provide analysis to a variety of options.

• The City of Madison, WI wanted to understand who they were serving well, and who they were not. They wanted to understand the impact of their by appointment locations as well as get an idea of how much better they could do by selecting a different constellation of early voting sites.

Academic Manuscripts:

• A Scalable Approach to Equitable Facility Location (June, 2024)

• Optimizing Fair Geographic Access to Polling (September, 2024)

Our Services

Free to use code base:

The code behind our analysis is open source and publicly available. Download it. Use it. Let us know what you think. Tell us what features you would like added. Add features you need yourself, and tell us how it went. Most importantly, have fun. All we ask is that you cite us and keep it open source.

Analytics services:

Polling location analytics services use complex ensembles of disparate data sets and models to provide the insights we give. Working in the civil rights space, VRC believes that it is crucial to understand the biases inherent in each of our models and datasets. Otherwise, we will algorithmically perpetuate the very cycle of systemic biases that we seek to counteract.

• Exploratory Analysis: 

  • Do you want to understand the polling access situation in a large number of counties, or how it may change as more locations are added or removed? 

  • Send us a list of existing polling locations and potential polling locations, and we will send you a list of optimized polling locations, graphs and maps analyzing polling access, as well as an overview of the insights that we see.

• Bespoke, In Depth Analysis: 

  • Do you have a handful of counties to study from multiple different angles? 

  • Do you have a subset of a county (such as a specific city) that you want to study in depth? 

  • Do you have a wealth of historical data that you want to compare?

  •  Let us meet with you to define a set of well scoped questions to ask the model to answer, 

    •  provide you with an in depth report on the model’s findings,

    •  and have a retrospective session to shape the next set of questions you wish to ask.