In 2008, The Pew Charitable Trusts and Google realized voters were having trouble finding accurate voting information. Millions of people were looking for answers to three main questions: “Where do I vote?”, “What’s on my ballot?”, and “How do I navigate the election process?” but no standardized, reliable, and official source for this information existed. Pew partnered with Google and the states to address the issue by creating the Voting Information Project (VIP). Pew works on VIP with state election officials to develop cutting-edge solutions to standardize and publish the data, and Google and other partners have ensured that voters find data where they’re looking for it most — online. The results of this partnership have been dramatic. During the 2014 general election, official information provided by VIP was accessed an estimated 31 million times from a variety of sources, including: Google products, such as Search; customized tools on the websites of national organizations such as the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Rock the Vote, and the League of Women Voters; or, on one of over 1,500 websites that housed VIP’s white-label voting information tool.
Additionally, Pew, in collaboration with The Internet Association and technology companies like Facebook, Foursquare, Google, and Twitter created the website Get to the Polls that saw approximately 8 million total page views, most on Election Day.
In addition to serving voters, VIP is also committed to providing state and local election officials with the resources they need to deliver important voting information to their constituents. To this end, VIP offers several free, open-source tools and apps that election officials can use to reach their voters:
The Voting Information Tool is an easily embeddable, mobile-optimized, white-label tool that provides official voting information–such as polling place and ballot information–to anyone using just a residential address. It is available in 10 languages. During the 2014 general election, the tool was embedded on the official state website in the following states: California, Iowa, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia.
Full Article: electionlineWeekly.