Google Tool Will have Wrong Polling Place Locations for Millions of Voters [Google]

Google’s polling place locator was speculated to make your life easier by guiding you to the suitable polling place on the way to vote. The one trouble? It’s going to have guided you and thousands and thousands to the inaccurate place.

After a Fast Company editor got a wrong address from Google’s polling place locator this morning, we wondered whether others got similarly bad info on mid-term election day from Google’s tool. In step with Aristotle, a personal company that offers political technology and information for campaigns, the Google polling place finder could have had locations wrong for as many as 727,000 households inside the 12 states they sampled.

In other words, as many as a million or more people that Googled where to vote this morning will have been sent to the incorrect place. In states akin to Manhattan, voting at the inaccurate polling place is unlawful.

” For folk in this business, there are few stuff you lose sleep over more than sending people to the incorrect polling place on election day,” John Phillips, CEO of Aristotle, tells Fast Company.

Following our story, Aristotle, which creates its own polling place locator tool, contacted Fast Company to tell us that, within the previous two weeks, that they had been testing the information Google was using to ascertain its accuracy. For all the 12 states they tested, they pulled 1,000 random addresses belonging to registered voters. They then entered those addresses into the Google tool to work out polling places it produced. They then took those same addresses and inputted them into tools on the websites belonging to official election agencies, and then compared the output of the Google tool to the output of the election agencies.

The error rate from the Google tool, in keeping with Aristotle’s analysis, ranged from 0.001% (for Iowa) to 18% (for the state of Washington). Extrapolating from that data, Aristotle estimated that Google’s data had incorrect polling place information for approximately 727,000 households in those 12 states (Arkansas, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, DC, and Washington state).

Chart provided by Aristotle

Google’s election gadget, that is embeddable and therefore is perhaps sitting on sites across the net (including Facebook), draws its data from the Voting Information Project in addition as directly from individual election boards. It was not clear as of this writing where the break might need happened.

The Voting Information Project, a program of the Pew Center on the States, draws its data directly from various election agencies around the country and makes it available without cost to third parties to take advantage of for applications like Google’s tool, or the Mobile Polling Place Locator we told you about last week. In cases where agencies failed to manage a pipeline via the Voting Information Project, Google receive polling place information directly from election agencies themselves.

Doug Chapin, the director of Election Initiatives at the Pew Center, told us that the VIP works ” closely with election officials to get essentially the most up-to-date official information.” ” We’ll continue to work hard to be certain that the data we get is not just easy for voters in finding and use but could also be accurate-a process which began long before Election Day 2010 and should continue going forward,” he said.

A Google spokesperson told us this morning, ” We are constantly updating the tool to ensure it reflects one of the most up-to-date information provided to us by the Board of Elections.” Additionally they noted that the tool encompasses a link where users can send information about discrepancies. Reached again today, Google declined to elaborate on its statement following the Aristotle revelations.

Pundits may bemoan the dearth of voter participation in our elections. But the problems with the Google tool’s data simply underline the undeniable fact that, even in this hyperconnected era, data about polling places across the country continues to be not kept in a single, standardized location, which undermines the efforts of companies like Google to create tools that make it simple and simple for voters in finding up where they ought to occur come Election Day.

In the meantime, whenever you haven’t voted yet and need to be super-extra sure of where to vote, that you need to locate your state or city election agency online and confer with their information. (As an example, here’s the list of Polling Place Lookups for election boards in California.)

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This post is tagged: election agencies, political technology, polling place information, polling place locator, registered voters, state of washington