My state votes by mail (or ballot boxes). Every election, the county sends a voter’s pamphlet with candidates and ballot box locations. I decided to map all of them, and was happy to see that a little more than half were already there. For these, most were missing at least some of the information, so I added to those.
Using satellite imagery, you can easily see most of them, so it makes it pretty easy to map them all.
On the nodes themselves, I included the following tags:
amenity=polling_station
drive_through=[yes/no] # most are, but some are not
last_checked=[current_date]
location=[outdoor/indoor]
name=[x County Ballot Drop Box]
opening_hours=24/7 # almost all are 24/7, except for some indoor boxes
polling_station=ballot_box
There were a few indoor boxes that I need to go survey in person. Once I get those, all except for one will be on the map in my county. The final remaining one is indoors on a military base, so I will be unable to survey for obvious reasons.
I do wonder if there’s a better way to set the hours, since they’re closed for most of the year except during elections. Because of special elections and primaries, I cannot just say that they’re open from October to November. If anyone knows of a better way, please let me know! Additionally, I wonder if it’s better to name them using the location name from the voter’s pamphlet, rather than a generic county drop box name.
I encourage everyone to add their local ballot boxes before your next election, wherever you are!
The last_checked portion of this was discussed in the crosspost and has been fixed to be check_date instead.
The date was current in the sense that it was pulled from the voter’s pamphlet and county website on that day, but point taken. Both the state and county also offer detailed descriptions of ballot box locations (not just address) which told me exactly which white box was which in most cases. For example, “Next to the fire station sign”, “In front of the main entrance”, “In front of the town hall building entrance, on the right”, “Adjacent to the accessible parking”. Since they’re always white boxes next to sidewalks or parking lots, this made it very easy to find them on the imagery.
Some drop boxes were also ones that I had already seen physically, which helped. As more than half were already on the map, thanks to other contributors, all I was checking in that case was that it was listed in the pamphlet and website, not necessarily exact location of said nodes that I was modifying. I will probably remove check_date from these and survey them in person within the next week or so.
For those that I didn’t already know about and which were not otherwise described with the detailed description on the state and county websites, I’ll also remove the check_date and survey them in person to validate the placement of the node. It’ll likely only be a few boxes, but I agree that no info is better than wrong info.
Thanks for the advice.