Announcing the 2009 Virginia Voting Information Project Google Gadget

We’ve been planning this for ages, so we’re excited to finally announce the launch of the 2009 Virginia Voting Information Project Google gadget. As part of the VIP team, I’m not an unbiased source, but I think it’s pretty freaking fantastic. As we’ve said from the beginning, our goal is to help Election officials provide voters the information they need to participate effectively in elections. Our tool does that by providing a way for websites to easily make available to Virginia voters their polling place location. Starting later this week, it will also provide a list of candidates that will be on a voter’s ballot.

Here’s how it works. This is what the VIP Google gadget looks like after it’s embedded. Any webpage owner (you!!), can go here, and get the code to embed the gadget. Need extra help with this step? Try here. Once the gadget is embedded, any Virginia resident accessing your website will be able to find their polling location, obtain directions to the polls, and, starting later this week, view the list of candidates appearing on the ballot. The gadget uses information directly from the Virginia State Board of Elections, so it will be providing Virginians the official version of their polling place information at all times.

We’re super excited about the project, and hopefully this will be a big help to campaigns, schools, newspapers, and other organizations who want to help get Virginia voters the information they need to vote.

If you have any questions about the gadget, or if you have feedback for us, we’d love to hear from you. If you want to know more about the project, I suggest reading this.

And while we’re high-fiving ourselves at VIP headquarters, we’d be remiss if we didn’t thank the Virginia Board of Elections. Throughout the project, they’ve been amazingly helpful, and we love their approach to ensuring election information is easily distributed by lots of different channels. We’re especially thankful to Paul Stenbjorn and Bhavani Gollu who worked tirelessly to help us put together the VIP feed that powers the gadget. And of course, our partners at Google made a herculean effort to get the gadget ready for launch. Thanks to the team, Ginny Hunt, Dan Berlin, and Mike Geary.

A quick note: the tool is currently suffering from some errors of omission. Translated from tech speak that means there are some voters for which the gadget won’t return a polling place location. We use the same data that the Virginia’s Board of Election uses, but some addresses get confused in the conversion to Google-standardized addresses. For instance, if a voter lives in Henrico County for electoral purposes, but has a Richmond postal address, then the tool is unable to return a polling place location. Also, anyone with an address ending in Trail or Square is running into problems. We’re aware of these issues and we’re working to overcome them.

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