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Google's Launches New Open Source Voter Information Tool

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Sun, 2012-11-04 15:46 — luis

With the election almost here, Google has created a tool which will help those (myself included) that may have misplaced their Voter Information Pamphlet and Sample Ballot.  Yes, my random piles of paper organizing system needs to be overhauled!  The tool can be used to find information about polling place locations, early voting locations/rules, and the politicians that are running in the associated districts.  This tool looks particularly helpful because it's not geared to a specific region of the country (much like the election websites of local governments), it can be used by anyone in the country that's visiting the tool from a device in the U.S, or by entering a residential address in the U.S.

When the voter tool's homepage is loaded, the application looks at the U.S State location of the source IP and loads corresponding coarse grained election information at the federal and state level.  Some of this information includes the presidential candidates, senatorial candidates and state referenda (propositions).  Once a residential addressed is entered, it will return more fine grained information about specific polling places, early voting locations in the municipalities, and information about judicial and county board of education candidates.

The tool also comes with helpful information about web search trends, voting trends and vote counts at the state level along with associated campaign ad spending.  Want to learn more about state propositions?  The tool will link you directly to the proposition in question to the specific page in the General Election pamphlet.  Maybe it was good you "organized" that Voter Information pamphlet with no chance of retrieval?

I couldn't find how exactly the information was gathered, but I assume election information from across the country is gathered using various automated website scraping techniques (which involve reading the content of pdf documents) and displaying only the information pertinent to the user of the tool.  Also from what I can tell, voter information sources only come from official government election sources and the federal, state and local level.

Link to Google's voter tool:  https://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/vote

Link to the story:  http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/10/29/google-launches-open-source-voter-information-tool-in-advance-of-the-2012-us-presidential-elections/