BallotReady acquires PioneerGov’s Artificial Intelligence Tech
See how this new tool enables us to collect local government data more quickly and accurately.
Last year, BallotReady acquired PioneerGov's groundbreaking technology for elected official data gathering powered by A.I.
By implementing Natural Learning Processing (NLP) in our database, we will increase our data efficiency, quality, speed, and accelerate our mission of aggregating democracy's data at every level of government.
From the founders:
“There was a huge need to build a scalable and agile data collection system to help constituents & organizations fully participate in local elections. I couldn’t be more excited for this technology to live within BallotReady's tech stack and contribute to their mission of making all levels of election data accessible and actionable.”- Ben Darr, Founder of PioneerGov
“We are thrilled by the ways this technology is moving our mission forward by providing our users and customers more data to help them take action in our democracy.” - Alex Niemczewski, CEO of BallotReady.
Scroll down to see how it works.
The problem:
Local election and government data are not at all standardized– county offices across the country post things like election results and ballots differently and often in different formats (html, pdf, excel, handwritten).
This lack of uniformity creates barriers for both researchers and the public to easily access, aggregate and provide this critical information, and leads to a more time-consuming and manual process for the BallotReady Research team.
The solution:
PioneerGov used web scraping and a type of AI called Natural Language Processing (NLP) to train a system across national and statewide data to automatically and correctly identify election & officeholder data on government websites across a number of formats.
Now by applying this newly acquired machine learning technology to BallotReady’s extensive database of local government, we can more efficiently extract the data that we need from disparate data sources on the internet by recognizing patterns matching important data such as mailing addresses or position names.
How it will help:
This technology will increase our data efficiency, quality, speed, and automatically accelerate our goal of aggregating democracy's data at every level of government
BallotReady will be building upon PioneerGov's existing tools to supercharge the language learning model with our own proprietary database and layering on our existing internal quality assurance
This includes using the technology to correctly identify a number of new data sources such as county-wide, judicial and school board positions.
This NLP will automatically improve upon itself as we expose it to more data- and the quality and speed will only continue to increase the longer its being used.