Google’s Voter Information Tool Helps You on Election Day

Here in the US there are two things on many minds. Recovering from the severe storms that lashed major portions of the East Coast and upper Midwest, and next week’s National and Local elections. Tuesday, November 6 will be the big day. Despite all of the craziness you are hearing about possibly moving the election day because of the storms, I’m reasonably sure that the polls will be open as planned. Historically, newspapers have traditionally published mock ballots and lists of polling places and probably will continue to do that again this year. I can remember clipping that out of the paper and carrying the info with me to the polling place on some elections with full slates.  But now in the digital age we have digital resources available for that kind of thing as well.

Google has released its Voter Information Tool to help you locate your polling place and also give you a slate of candidates for the various offices that are up for election in your district. The tool also provides info on early vote locations, voting rules and regulations (a big topic this year), and links to the candidates’ social media sites. All you need provide is your address and the site provides you with the info. If you’re running a website you can embed the tool on your site. The code is open source.

It will be interesting to see if changes are made to voting sites because of the storms on the East Coast how timely this information may or may not be updated. In the meantime, the tool is a handy online method of finding out where you should go to exercise your privilege to vote.