CMPS 183 - FINAL Project authors: Sean Mendonca, smendonc@ucsc.edu Andrew H. Pometta, apometta@ucsc.edu Class: CMPS 183, Fall quarter, 2016 Presented 6 December 2016 Project Name: Voting for Dummies URL: http://apometta.pythonanywhere.com/

The aim of this project is to provide a basic, simple tool for voters to store their prospective votes, view what they can vote on, and provide a quick and easy resource center for other important voting links (registering to vote, where to vote, etc).

The website can be accessed by navigating to apometta.pythonanywhere.com. The top bar contains useful links to check whether a user is registered, where they can vote, and what their rights are. The statewide elections are also shown. For this site, 2014 election data is used due to its easy availability and storage. In 2014, there were, on the general election ballot, 6 statewide propositions (propositions 43-48) and a gubernatorial election.

If a user logs in, or registers, they input their location name. When they do, they can see measures and races for their local county and city as well. In addition, they have the ability to save their votes, and a button provides a quick link to a basic page where they can print this information, to be used as a pre-prepared cheat sheet during voting.

The database holds information acquired and reorganized from the California Elections Data Archive (CEDA), although the statewide information was hardcoded in. Separate database tables are used to store measures (propositions) and races (with candidates). There are also two separate tables for storing which measures and races users have stored their votes for. Stored votes are, naturally, unique to each user, as well as their location.

USAGE NOTES:

• Despite asking for "city", either city our county works. The only place that demands a differentiation, from an eyeball view of the spreadsheet, is San Luis Obispo, which had city propositions but no county named after it. You'll probably get an error if you put it in, since the county is unknown (in the best case, you just won't get county information). Putting in legitimate cities that had no city measures/races and aren't the names of counties fails, since they are not in the database: just put in the county name instead.
• The print page is really basic, but it's only intention is to record the answers. It could be a lot prettier, but the mantra of this entire, fairly ugly project is "it works".