Get Set for the 2008 Presidential Election with Tools and Mapplets from Google
September 25th, 2008 by Nate LinnellThe first presidential debate is tomorrow night which means we are now into the home stretch of the presidential election. Are you registered to vote? Do you know where you’re polling place is located? Have you made your decision as to who you’ll vote for? What do you know about the vice presidential candidates? What are Barack Obama and John McCain saying on the important issues?
These are some of the questions that Google attempts to help answer with a series of mapplets and other tools that are available for everyone’s use. This post gives some details on what these mapplets and tools are.
First up is the Elections ’08 Map Gallery. This is a very interesting set of maps that allow you to gather extensive information on a wide range of topics dealing with the election. Among the topics areas that you can view are:
- Track the candidates on the campaign trail
- View the speeches by location that Obama and McCain have given throughout the election
- Predict the election results by selecting which candidate you think will win each state
- Visually see the life journey of both vice presidential candidates
- And much more
Google has also released a mapplet that allows users to gather 2008 US Voter Information for any area in the United States. Just enter your address and you can see how many days you have to get registered to vote, links and phone numbers to get additional voter information for your area, where to vote (won’t be available until mid-October), and directions to get to your voting location.
This could be particularly valuable for organizations that are trying to register new voters. After they get them registered, they can direct them to this mapplet to get directions to their voting location or even print out directions and give them to the newly registered voter. Registering to vote is only the first step, so hopefully this can help increase voter turnout.
The last tool is Google In Quotes. This is a tool that is in Google Labs, so it’s in its experimental stage at this point, but still provides very valuable information. The tool pulls in quotes from stories that are linked to Google News. The idea is to allow you to see the position that each candidate has on the various issues and read quotes from each candidate.
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