The Wonder That Was The 2009 VIP Gadget

The story so far...

As you already know, our good friends Paul Stenbjorn and Bihvani Gollu along with the rest of the team at the Virginia Board of Elections put together an XML feed of voting information for Virginia for their statewide election this Fall. Our partner Google, created an awesome, embeddable gadget. Essentially, any website could easily copy code from Google and drop a polling place look-up tool into their website for their visitors to use. In addition to telling a user where their polling place was and the hours it was open, it also provided driving directions and listed the candidates appearing on the user's ballot.

The websites choosing to use the Google gadget represented a rainbow of colors across the political spectrum. We had conservative campaigns, progressive campaigns, newspapers, unions, issue campaigns and the biggest feather in our cap, the Virginia State Board of Elections used our gadget on their front page. (VIP takes a bow). You can see a complete list of sites using the VIP gadget here.

Because we didn't want to confuse voters we took the gadget down the moment the polls closed. (Google has generously left the API open, and you can access it here.) If you missed seeing the wonder that was the 2009 VIP gadget in person, we have recreated the experience for you now.

The gadget could be embedded in any website – here's how it looked on the Virginia State Board of Elections website.

A voter could enter an address into the search box ...

And the gadget would return a map of the address and the polling location for that address:

And by clicking "View Full Details" a user could see who was listed on their ballot:

As we move into the 2010 cycle, we're looking forward to even more exciting tools developers will create that help distribute voting information. If you're interested in getting involved, feel free to contact us at info@votinginfoproject.org.