Google Gets Into Politics With Civic Info API

mikejuk writes "The new Google Civic Information API can be used to look up comprehensive voting information for particular addresses in the U.S. such as the polling place, early vote sites, contests, and local election official contact information. At the moment the API is limited to voting information for elections in the U.S., but Google plans to expand the support to cover other countries and include other types of civic information. Google plans to use the API to power their own election tools, including an embeddable app anyone can use on their site."

Re:anyone can use on their site...

[mspohr]

Did you even try to read the article?
This gives publicly available information on poling places and elected official contact information plus the election contests that an address is able to vote in.
Nothing about individual votes before or after an election.

Re:anyone can use on their site...

[Anonymous Coward]

huh wha?

"The Google Civic Information API can be used to look up comprehensive voting information for particular addresses in the U.S. such as the polling place, early vote sites, contests, and local election official contact information. The new API replaces Google’s Election Center API."

I don't see where it says "put your name in" or "tell us who you're going to vote for"....it seems to be a method to inform voters. God forbid we have an educated electorate.

Buried Links

[guttentag]

TFA has lots of phantom links to drive their advertising revenue. Here are the links to the actual content we're talking about:

• Main Politics & Elections Page [google.com]
• Registration Information for Voters [google.com]
• Google Consumer Surveys [google.com] (This has the potential to be shady)
• Trends [google.com] (This has the potential to be shady... at what point does the reported trend start to affect the actual trend in a kind of feedback loop?)
• Primary Results Data [google.com]

As an aside, years ago I worked with Kiwanis (a community service organization) on an initiative to promote political awareness among high school kids. At first I was concerned that they were going to try to push a particular viewpoint or agenda, but they made it clear that as an organization, for the purposes of this initiative, they were completely agnostic about it. Their mandate was to get people involved, and informed, so they could make their own decisions, because that's how the system works best. The system fails when you have a few informed people and masses of uninformed people who just vote for the candidate they think is the most attractive. So if that is Google's intent (which is the impression I get), it's an honorable goal. And making the API available seems to be an effort to give more people the tools to pursue that goal.

As long as Google doesn't start skewing the information (or, through a security hole, allows someone else to skew it), this is a good thing. There should be some sort of oversight to ensure that.