SF Standard 2024 Election

In fall 2024, I got to collaborate with members of The San Francisco Standard’s team on a number of election-related projects.

The biggest of these projects was our election results page. I helped plan, coordinate, design, build, and maintain this page alongside data reporter Noah Baustin and software engineer Andrei Zamfira. Our system retrieved election results data in real time from the city of San Francisco and the state of California and used it to update charts we produced in Datawrapper. Our charts generally updated faster than those available on the governments’ own websites. The election results page became one of the top-performing posts of the entire year for The Standard.

I also worked on some pre-election projects to help readers understand the election. The first to publish was a quiz that readers could use to check how closely their political positions align with those of the San Francisco mayor candidates. Rather than produce a traditional voter guide, the idea was to help readers understand the candidates in a way that was relevant to what they individually cared most about. The Standard’s politics team wrote the questions and answers for the quiz. I designed and built the quiz using Alpine.js.

Another project was a chatbot that answered questions about the mayoral candidates. It was powered by a custom GPT provided information about the candidates. My role here was to design the chat interface. Source information was curated by the newsroom and the bot was built by our engineering team.