“Precinct Progress implements modern web tools to help Progressive (Democratic) precincts and their leaderships collaborate and manage their data.”
I wrote that succinct description of Precinct Progress some years ago, and it still holds. It’s an ambitious goal given the range of tools already out there for pieces of these tasks. Here I’ll walk through what this effort has addressed over time, why it does what it does, and a bit about how.
Overview
This work started in 2018 as a ground-up, volunteer reimplementation of the Harris County Democratic Party (HCDP) website — moving it off an older, less flexible content management system onto a fully custom platform. After several months of work by a team of volunteers, the new site went live and gave HCDP a much-needed boost.
Website Capabilities
Over time the site grew a full set of voter-facing features:
- A home page with a carousel, news widgets, social feeds, and upcoming calendar items
- A calendar page
- A party-leadership page with photo/contact cards for each officeholder
- A candidates page with photo/contact cards
- A news & information (blog) section
- A legal-notices section
- Forms for “Find My Precinct,” precinct-chair applications and resignations, volunteers, donations, and more
On the staff side, it began with the ability to display, track, and manage all of those form submissions.
Precinct Chair Tracking
For a long time, the county relied on one dedicated person maintaining a private database of precinct and Senate District officials — coordinating with Senate District and HCDP officials to meet Texas Secretary of State recordkeeping requirements. Having such a person was invaluable, but a single private database covering more than a thousand precincts and eight Senate Districts was destined to become a bottleneck.
While we were building the “Find My Precinct” function, it became clear we needed a reliable way to keep precinct and Senate District data online and current. So I built a custom system to create, display, manage, and track precinct-chair and Senate District data.
What that gives us today: a private, always-current roster — visible to precinct chairs, Senate District staff, and HCDP staff — of every precinct and its leadership. Because there are well over a thousand precincts, the data is paged and sortable (alphabetically, by Senate District, by precinct range). Each entry shows the precinct, and where filled, the chair’s name and contact info and their Senate District — and lets you draw a map of every precinct intersecting a 0.5-, 1-, or 3-mile radius around a chosen precinct. That roster anchors a private Precinct Chair Portal of news and information to help chairs organize and get out the vote.
March 2020 Inflection
In late 2019, HCDP decided to separate the staff-and-official-facing portion of the site from the voter-facing portion. HCDP moved its public site back to an off-the-shelf CMS, and I split the Precinct Chair Portal and related back-office functions off into Precinct Progress itself. That division was healthy — the voter-facing site is comparatively simple, and the split let each side focus and move at its own pace.
Redistricting, Twice
Keeping precinct data current means living through redistricting. We’ve now been through two cycles with this platform:
- 2022: Harris County went from 1,012 to 1,152 precincts. I built a GIS method to compare old and new precincts by area overlap, both directions — see Comparing 2020 vs. 2022 Precincts — Harris County, TX.
- 2026: the county went from 1,172 to 1,224 precincts, though 97.4% are essentially unchanged — see How Harris County’s Precincts Changed for 2026. The same analysis now covers Dallas and Tarrant, and the state as a whole.
The methodology matured from a weekend spreadsheet into a repeatable, mapped analysis — the kind of spatial work that’s now core to what Precinct Progress offers.
A New Platform (2026)
Precinct Progress has been rebuilt on a modern foundation: a custom Django application backed by a dedicated geographic-data service (the WattsLab PostGIS API) for precinct geometry and spatial queries, with interactive maps for radius lookups and redistricting analysis. “Find My Precinct” is public, so any Harris County resident can look up their precinct, district, and leadership — and the same spatial engine powers the chair-facing tools behind it.
The Future
With redistricting handled, the focus turns outward: extending this approach beyond Harris County — to other Texas metros first, and potentially beyond. The precinct-comparison methodology is now a recipe rather than a one-off, and the limiting factor is data — each new county needs its maps and rosters before we can tell its story. If that describes a place you organize, we’d like to hear from you.
This article is a work in progress. If you were involved in any part of this effort and I didn’t mention or credit you — and you’d like me to — please let me know via our Contact Us form or at info@precinctprogress.com. It’s genuinely hard to know who does and doesn’t want to be named, so just say the word.