Know Your Vote
Social media shapes how people vote, and much of what circulates is biased or fabricated. Big parties can afford campaigns on every channel, while small parties and independent candidates struggle to reach voters at all.
For the 2019 Indian general election, Hariprasad KC and I ran an experiment: a website with the essential facts about every candidate. With the election under two weeks away, we focused on Chennai’s three constituencies, Chennai North, Chennai Central, and Chennai South.
Scraping the web wasn’t reliable enough, and some candidates had no digital footprint at all, so we took the data from the affidavits candidates file to contest: personal, party, and financial information, and criminal records.
The flow is simple: pick your constituency, or enter your PIN code if you don’t know it, then browse the candidates and open any of them for details.
Some voters have colour blindness or low vision, so the interface is minimal, uses Lato at a heavy weight, and sticks to high-contrast colours. Cards and tables carry the data. I designed it in Sketch and made the brand in Illustrator.
I built the front end with Bootstrap, SCSS, and jQuery to WCAG AA, with WAI-ARIA attributes for screen readers, and checked it with Lighthouse. Hariprasad built the Go back end, serving candidate data from JSON on Google Cloud App Engine. The core build took three days, followed by usability and cross-browser testing.
The site had more than 8,000 unique visitors during the election, and many people told us it worked as a one-stop place to learn about every candidate. They also asked for Tamil, Malayalam, and Hindi versions, articles on voter literacy, other districts and states, and an open-source codebase.
- Team
- Hariprasad KC and me
- My part
- UI/UX design, branding, front-end development
- Stack
- HTML, SCSS, jQuery, Bootstrap, Go, Google Cloud
- Design
- Sketch, Illustrator
- When
- 7 – 16 Apr 2019