Texas disenfranchises voters
Isochrone’s analysis shows more than 2 million people were negatively impacted in Harris County
By: Alex Yule
New Mapbox blog posts are now published on www.mapbox.com/blog. Leave your email to receive email updates when new posts are published or subscribe to new RSS feeds.
With just weeks left until election day, Texas Governor Abbott reduced the number of ballot drop boxes across the state to one per county. The change reduces ballot drop-off locations from 12 to 1 in Harris County, which includes Houston and is the third most populous county in the US with more than 4.7 million people. Voting rights advocates are now suing the state because Recent changes in Texas disenfranchise voters who already face barriers to voting because it forces them to travel further to vote. The team at the Center for American Progress used isochrone and census data to show how these changes dramatically reduced voting access for millions of people across the region.
“Prior to Abbott’s order, 87 percent of Harris County residents could access a polling place within a 20-minute drive; now, only 29 percent of residents can drop off their ballot within that time frame.”
Isochrones calculate how long it takes to travel from a certain point, in any direction. These buffers are more accurate than ‘on-the-fly’ circular buffers because they take into account the actual route to a given location. When adding, removing, or changing polling locations, the isochrone indicates accessibility areas.
There are several parameters to set when creating an isochrone, but the most important is the ‘contour size’, which specifies the travel time in minutes. Set this to an appropriate accessibility threshold for analysis and select a driving, walking, or cycling route profile. For this ballot delivery use case, the team used a 20-minute drive time, which represents a 40-minute round trip to vote during a lunch break, not including last-minute wait times or traffic. Here’s an example query showing a 20-minute drive time isochrone around the NRG Arena in Houston, the last remaining drop-off location in the region:
https://api.mapbox.com/isochrone/v1/mapbox/driving/-95.4068219375%2C29.6818331875?contours_minutes=20&polygons=true&generalize=0&access_token=YOUR_MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN
In CAP’s analysis, they truncate this shape to the Harris county line because voters in Texas cannot cross county lines to access ballot drop boxes.
Another analysis conducted by ProPublica in 2018 examined how changes to North Carolina’s early voting rules impacted voters across the state. And in states and counties seeking to expand access to safe voting options, travel time analysis can help identify populations that remain underserved.
What accessibility and equality questions will you answer with isochrones? Learn more about how to get started with the Isochrone API: https://docs.mapbox.com/help/tutorials/get-started-isochrone-api/.
Working on election-related maps? Put it in Election Mapping Challenges.
For non-profit organizations, useful tools to help voters during the 2020 US election, our Community team can support.
Alexander D. Yule – Solutions Architect – Mapbox | LinkedIn
Texas disenfranchises voters: Isochrone analysis shows more than 2 million votes negatively impacted in… Originally published in a map for developers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
