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Announcing Election Info Using Apps Script to Provide Voting Information

It’s time for the 2012 General Election in the United States and along with it comes the tedious process of finding your voter registration, polling sites, times, directions, etc. The previously announced Google Civic Information API provides a great service to programmatically obtain much of this information based on the your home address. Google Apps Script makes it really quick and easy to build a web application that queries this information and uses various Google services to organize and track your information.

Election Info is a sample application built using Apps Script that can:

• Query the Google Civic Information API to find polling locations and hours using client side JavaScript and AJAX.
• Display polling information using HtmlService with jQuery for a clean effective UI.
• Generate static maps via UrlFetch and the MapsService to show polling maps and directions.
• Create a calendar event for election day with your polling location using the Calendar service.
• Generate a bring-along document with poll directions and hours using the Document service.
• Send you an email with a summary with your polling place information using the Gmail service.
• Store your previous searches in UserProperties so it will remember your likely home address the next time you launch the app.

As you can see, this is a comprehensive sample app that is useful while also highlighting key Apps Script capabilities.

Install the app from the Chrome Web Store. Check back soon as we will be writing a blog post with details and sample code on how the sample was built.

Arun Nagarajan   profile | twitter Arun is a Developer Advocate on Google Apps Script. Arun works closely with the community of partners, customers and developers to help them build compelling applications on top of Google Apps using Apps Script. In the past, he spent over 9 years building and designing platforms and infrastructure for enterprise mobile applications.. Arun is originally from the Boston area and enjoys basketball and snowboarding.

Posted by olly at 4:30 PM

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Labels: announcing, apps, election, info, information, provide, script, to, using, voting