VOTERIG

Initial State

Inspiration

Over the past century, society has made great strides toward equity in voting rights. However, many, more subtle forms of voter suppression, such as polling place consolidation, which is explored in the game, still persit. In this project, we explore how authorities can abuse their power of determining polling locations to discourage many voters from exercising their right to vote.

What it does

VOTERIG places the player in the chair of a crooked county commissioner who takes advantage of a well researched trend of voter turnout decreasing with an increase in distance to the nearest polling location in order to help their party win the election by strategically placing polling locations to maximize the turnout of their voter base. Throughout different levels, the gameplay becomes more realistic, challenging and interesting as the distribution of voters on the map changes and constraints are added on the placement of ballot boxes.

How we built it

We used Javascript, CSS and HTML to build our website. The variations in clustering of population, tabulating score and multiple levels were all made using JavaScript, the User Interface was enhanced using CSS and HTML and the game rendering was done using HTML Canvas.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was while developing level 5, in correctly sampling the density distribution and calculating the fairness index to ensure that the polling booths were placed justly for them to be accessible to all voters.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have made a game that is fun to play, with a progressive story line. We have also made an intuitive and beautiful UI, with smooth canvas-powered animations.

What we learned

We learned a lot about voter supression, its causes, and its negative effects of society. We also learned more about web application developments.

What's next for VOTERIG

We want to improve implement more game levels and introduce new game mechanics. We want the player to be able to customize the gameplay to a greater extent. We also want to implement general UI improvements.