Build apps for elections with the Google Civic Information API
By Chetan Sabnis, Google Politics & Elections Team
Cross-posted from the Google
Politics & Elections Blog
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful. To make it easier for you to build apps with voting information on the web, we are
releasing our new
Google Civic
Information API. The API enables you to look up comprehensive voting information for
an individual U.S. address, including polling place, early vote sites, contests, and local
election official contact information. By releasing this API, we hope to unleash the
creativity of the Internet and help you build innovative products that push civic information
to your communities in interesting ways.
As you know, this type of information can change frequently as we get closer to Election Day,
and we will make every effort to ensure we're returning timely and accurate data. We have also
included contact information for local election officials in the API so voters can find the
most accurate information.
While this API only includes voting information for elections in the U.S., we plan to expand
to other countries and include other types of civic information. Please join the
Google Civic
Information API Forum for updates on the data available and check out the
Google Politics & Elections page
to find more information about the work we are doing around the election and our international
elections programs.
You can
get
started here through the Google APIs Explorer. The API is available now, but please
note that full information isn't yet available for the November 6th General Election. We
expect to be able to provide full live data around the middle of October, as it becomes
available. For now, we recommend building your applications using the
test
data we provide. We'll be using the API to power our own election tools over the
coming weeks, including an embeddable app anyone can use on their site, and we're looking
forward to seeing the applications you come up with!
The Civic Information API replaces our previous
Google Election Center API, which will be
turned down after January 1, 2013.
For questions, comments, and to showcase your apps using the API, we encourage you to use the
Google Civic
Information API Forum.
Chetan Sabnis is a software engineer on the Google Politics & Elections team. In
his spare time, Chetan enjoys solving logic puzzles and crosswords.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
