The Voting Information Project is a partnership of state election officials, foundations, and leading technology companies working together to connect voters with the information they need to be more engaged citizens. Project participants include:

The Pew Center on the States
Google, Inc.

The foundation of an effective democracy is a well-informed electorate. And many Americans are hungry for information about elections. But as we approach the 2008 elections, findings from previous years indicate that voters often struggle to get answers to three basic questions:

• How do I register or find out if I'm registered?
• Where do I vote?
• What's on the ballot?

The paradox is that this information is available at the state and local level as part of election management systems and voter databases, many of which were created as a result of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Election officials use this information to manage the registration of new voters, select polling locations, and prepare ballots for the millions of voters who go to the polls each year. However, this information comes from a patchwork of data sources that are not consistently available to information providers, such as civic organizations, to whom voters turn for voting information. Nor are answers to voters' three basic questions readily accessible to the four out of five Americans who rely on search engines when looking for government information online.

INITIATIVE

Recognizing America's interest in making information about elections and how to vote easier to access, Google and The Pew Center on the States – through its Make Voting Work (MVW) initiative – are undertaking an effort to address this challenge. Known as the Voting Information Project, this partnership's ambition is to make official voting information provided by election officials both widely and equally available to the information providers – media, civic groups, search engines, and political parties – to whom American voters turn. In this way, we can best ensure that voters will more easily find answers to these three basic questions.

As a fundamental step in this initiative, the Voting Information Project is partnering with a group of state election officials to develop and implement a technical standard, known as an "open format," by which state and local election officials can more efficiently disseminate voting information. The states invited to participate in the pilot phase of this partnership were carefully chosen to reflect the nation's political and geographical diversity as well as the variety of election management technologies currently in use nationwide.

Through this open format, every address in America can be linked to its polling place. And with this link, voters will be able to gain access to the full range of voting information, including:

• Links to information about voter registration;
• Polling place address, directions and accessibility;
• Procedures governing voting, e.g. identification requirements;
• Type of voting equipment;
• Official information about candidates and issues on the ballot; and
• Polling place alternatives, such as absentee voting, early voting, and vote centers.

BENEFITS

As election officials structure and provide a "feed" of voting information in this open format, it will become available to all information providers in a recognized format. Thus, any organization – national or local, large or small – will be able to serve as a distribution channel for voting information directly from election officials to voters. Among the benefits:

• By proactively "pushing" voting information out to voters through information providers, rather than waiting for voters to call or visit their offices, election officials will likely experience considerable savings in staff time and resources;
• In serving as the originator of authoritative voting information, election officials can reduce the need for information services to gather and interpret voting information – which can result in errors and frustrated voters;
• Information providers that subscribe to the feeds will naturally link their users to the election officials' websites, increasing traffic to these sites and raising voters' awareness of the authoritative source of voting information;
• In taking the step of adopting the open format, election officials will be able enhance the presentation of voting information on their own websites, as they, too, will benefit from a structured feed of information.
• When the unpredictable happens, such as a polling place becoming unavailable, election officials will be able to efficiently issue updated information and anticipate that many information providers will communicate the update to voters.

Among this partnership's objectives is defining a solution to the challenge of efficiently disseminating voting information that requires no or minimal new technology investment and that is defined more by the repurposing of existing technology assets.

A HISTORY OF COMMITMENT TO ENCOURAGING ACCESS TO INFORMATION

This joint project is consistent with both Pew's record of investments in the elections field and Google's efforts to make public information more accessible to Internet users.

Since 2001, Pew has been serving the information needs of voters and the entire election community through its support of electionline.org, the nation's premier source for comprehensive, unbiased and reliable information analysis of election administration nationwide. More recently, Pew has increased its commitment to the field of elections through Make Voting Work, an ambitious initiative to identify and advance proven solutions that will enable Americans to vote and ensure their votes are counted. Pew has already announced the availability of $2 million dollars for research in the field of elections. MVW is also exploring other potential joint efforts with private sector and philanthropic partners with an eye toward continuing to ground the elections field in top-quality research informed by practical experience from the private sector.

As part of its mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, Google works with governments and not-for-profit organizations worldwide to make it easier for Internet users to discover and access government information sources. The search engine's partnerships with public sector organizations are defined by the principle that citizens should be just one search away from all online public information. In recent partnerships with the states of Arizona, California, Michigan, Virginia and Utah, based on implementation of the Sitemap Protocol standard, Google enabled these jurisdictions to make hundreds of thousands of public records more accessible to their citizens at no direct technology cost and with minimal staff time.