Announcing data updates for the Voting Access Monitor!
The Center for New Data team is pleased to announce exciting updates to the Voting Access Monitor (VAM)!
10-year trends: as part of the VAM 2.0 release, users will now be able to analyze changes in access to polling locations at the county and tract levels over the 2012-2022 period, for all available states. This will allow users to focus on trends in changes as opposed to most recent changes (2020-2022), thereby getting a better sense of the severity of issues in voting access.
Four new states released: data is now available for the states of Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania, bringing the count of states covered by the VAM to eight (with Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Wisconsin).
Enhanced used experience: it is now easier to scroll, zoom in and out and interact with the tooltip summary. VAM 2.0 is therefore more intuitive and requires no training before it can be used by community partners. Furthermore, back-end updates will allow for faster interaction with the VAM and lay the ground for the incorporation of new states and data points in future months.
We continue enriching the existing data with relevant demographic information and working on adding new equity layers for a deeper look into disparities in access to polling locations. We look forward to leveraging the new capabilities of the VAM with our voting rights and community partners. For more information about these updates, to share ideas, or to learn how you or your organization can access the VAM, don’t hesitate to contact us.
