Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
Build apps for elections with the Google Civic Information API
Friday, September 21, 2012
Cross-posted from the
Google Developers 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
.
Posted by Chetan Sabnis, Google Politics & Elections Team
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