Inspiration
Spurred on by our own voting experiences, those of our mentors and the general horror stories we have heard on voting wait times, our team realised that excessive wait times at the polls can have large impacts on whether people choose to express their right to vote. Most people do not have the luxury of time off work to vote, so an app which allows people to see all the wait times of voting stations around them and make an informed decision on which station to visit would be very useful.
What it does
Our app takes in a user's location, and outputs a list of all nearby polling stations and the associated wait times. These wait times are calculated by either having volunteers at the stations counting the number of people coming in and out, or having some sort of check-in/check-out process where people are able to log their progression through the queue. Our app will estimate a waiting time based on this data.
How we built it
We used an AWS mySQL databased to support our app, and used Node.js, Express.js and React.js to integrate this backend with our front end. We developed a web app for the purposes of this hackathon, but we also used Figma to provide mock-ups of what a mobile app version of VotingQ might look like.
Challenges we ran into
There were off course the general bugs of setting up the backend, integrating it with the frontend and praying that everything worked! Asides from that, we found some difficulty in managing how we retrieved/updated our database with our different commands, and we made some compromises to help streamline some of our development processes.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Having a simple, working web app was something we are super proud of. At some points, it was uncertain whether our product would work, so it was great to see that it did! We also learnt a lot of new development skills along the way, and were able to brush up on our existing development knowledge.
What we learned
All of gained some degree of exposure to Node.js, Express.js and React.js, as well as query a database. The general process of building and managing an app was also super insightful!
What's next for VotingQ
We would like to integrate it fully with Google Maps API, and use this to give more advanced metrics on total wait/travel time, beyond just displaying the locations on a map. It would potentially also be good for us to bring in some historical data, and try to predict waiting times throughout the day to allow users to find the best times to vote.
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