Election Day is approaching. Do you know where to cast a ballot?
A new online tool allows residents to input their address to see their City Council district, voting precinct, polling place and the easiest route to their voting location. The Vote Detroit tool was created by Detroit cartographer and activist Alex Hill in partnership with the Detroit Democracy Project and EngagedMI. It was inspired by a lack of awareness Hill noticed about new council maps authorized last year for 2025 elections – not only were residents uninformed, Hill said several candidates were looking for a map of the redrawn boundaries.
“We wanted an easy tool for people to plug in their address and know where to go,” Hill said. “The initial goal was helping people know that they were in a new council district.”
Elections Administrator Daniel Baxter said roughly 90,000 voters were impacted by the council redistricting. Detroiters should have received voter registration cards in the mail that display their polling location and which district they can vote in.
The City Charter requires all seven districts to be redrawn every 10 years based on U.S. Census population estimates. Boundary lines were drawn to keep an equal population across each district, but city planners were also charged with keeping neighborhoods together to preserve block clubs and other community organizations.
City Council members approved the new maps in early 2024. The new maps are being used in elections this year for the first time and will remain in effect until the next decennial census.
Some districts remained largely the same while others had more substantial changes. District 6 added a portion of one neighborhood while several neighborhoods moved from District 5 into District 4 and District 3.
The Vote Detroit tool allows residents to quickly learn whether they were drawn into a new district. It also shows the distance to their polling location. The city also has a webpage with resources on how to register to vote, how to find your polling place and how to track your absentee ballot status. It also links to a candidate questionnaire created by Citizen Detroit, a civic engagement group formed in 2012.
During the Aug. 5 primary, Detroiters will narrow the list of candidates for mayor, City Council, Board of Police Commissioners and Community Advisory Councils. Top vote-earners will move on to the November general election.
Hill said it was relatively easy to build the tool, but acquiring data was more difficult. The Detroit Election Department didn’t provide Hill with voting locations for the 2025 elections. That data was acquired through a BridgeDetroit inquiry.
After receiving the data BridgeDetroit obtained from the Election Department, Hill found polling locations had moved in 31 voting precincts out of 400.
The tool builds on previous work by Hill to track voting precincts and map the distance Detroiters travel to their assigned polling place. Hill found many examples where voters pass by polling locations to reach their voting spot, in some cases traveling more than three miles.
“It should be a place-based activity, where you vote with your neighbors, and you’re voting in your neighborhood, and you’re electing people who are going to represent that neighborhood,” Hill said. “How do we help people actually feel like they have buy-in? We should probably have precincts that are next to each other voting at the same place that’s down the street.”
Baxter said elections officials try to ensure polling places are as close to a voting precinct as possible, but there are limitations that get in the way.
“We are at the mercy of those buildings that we use,” Baxter said. “Detroit public schools, there aren’t as many, churches and other types of facilities. When schools close, we scramble to keep people (voting) in that community, but some people had to go long distances because there were no other (usable) buildings in that area.”
Voters can turn in an absentee ballot to any of the available voting centers or drop boxes. When in-person early voting starts on July 26, residents can cast a ballot at any of those locations, too.
Detroit maintained just over 500 voting precincts before the 2020 census recorded a population drop, requiring the city to shed 53 voting precincts. Precinct changes must be approved by the Detroit Election Commission, which is made up of three members: Clerk Janice Winfrey, City Council President Mary Sheffield and Corporation Counsel Conrad Mallett Jr.
Hill said there’s virtually no documentation of the latest Election Commission meeting where the current 400 precincts were decided.
“I have not been able to get a definitive answer,” Hill said. “I’ve asked the clerk. We’ve written a memo as the GO DATA Commission, as an official (city liaison), trying to do oversight on open data in the city. We’ve got nothing.”