Thursday, October 21, 2010

A hat tip to Art Pope’s Civitas Institute for providing two practical, fairly objective services without overt ideological interpretation (no doubt they’re offered this year because the GOP is promoting Early Voting, but anyone can use these tools). One service tracks the use of absentee voting; caution: counts of mail-in ballots and in-person ballots cast at Early Voting sites are combined for one total, so these figures are not just the results at One-Stop Early Voting centers. You can look up your county or follow changes in the statewide profile of who’s voting early. The information comes directly from a file that the State Board of Elections updates daily, which you can download at the Board’s ftp website. The second service is a handy link to the location of any county’s Early Voting site(s) that allows a person to map a travel plan to the site. Pretty nifty.