People offer lots of excuses for why they don't vote. But if you're one of the estimated 1.9 million people in 2008 whose excuse was that you weren't sure where to go, my apologies, because you now have three dead-simple solutions.


1. To find out where to vote right now: Enter your address into the Google Gadget below. You can customize and embed it on your own site, too, with the code here.

2. To help friends and family figure it out: Just tell them to search Google for the word "vote". The first result contains the polling-place finder OneBox you see below. (Or, you know, you could just send them directly to this page.)


3. To get directions when you're on the run, you can either direct your smartphone to m.google.com/elections , or text WHERE to 30644 to get directions texted to you, no matter how not-smart your phone is. Texting DONDE to the same number to get the answer en espanol. Via MobileCommons.

Here's some more background on the work that went into these seemingly simple tools, from Fast Company:

The idea of an SMS service for polling information seems like a no-brainer. But until now, something like this was essentially out of reach. Information about polling locations is maintained by individual election boards across the country. Creating a single database of all that information has been required super-human effort, not the least because it was all maintained in different formats.

The nonpartisan Voting Information Project, a program of the Pew Center on the States, gathered all that data, standardized it into a single format, and now is making it available-for free-for anyone to use.


You can also build your own app fueled by this data thanks to the Google Election Center API, or download the complete data set yourself.

Disclaimer: I work at the New Organizing Institute, one of several partner groups of the Voting Information Project. While I didn't work on this project, some of my friends did. I just think it's awesome.