The Code for America team’s plan had always been to leave the scarier stuff off the website — questions like, “Have you ever traded food stamps for explosives?” or “Have you ever committed a felony?” Those questions could be answered during the live interview. The key was to settle on how much information to ask for at the start. Require too much, and users would be put off and give up; too little, and the eligibility workers, who preferred more details rather than fewer, would complain. In the end, the team settled on a compromise.

"It appears that Pennsylvania's new strict photo ID requirement may be in effect a racially discriminatory voting procedure," Tamara Manik-Perlman, Azavea's spacial data analyst, wrote in a recently published blog post.

But she admitted that the findings are limited in scope because the analysis is confined to the city of Philadelphia, the only geographic area for which Azavea has all the relevant datasets.