I'm glad Washington has mail-in ballots, because I never need to know the
location of a polling place (unless I want to save postage). But for
700,000 people in 12 on-the-bubble states, who did need to know where
their polling places were yesterday, there was a massive FAIL from Google Election Center, which may have sent them to the wrong places on Election Day 2010.
Politico's Tony Romm interviewed John Phillips, CEO of Aristotle, a 25-year-old political
technology company that came up with the findings about the app that has
a feature for locating polling places (as well as information on
registering to vote, ballots and state and local election office
contacts).
Phillips told Politico: "If you're being sent to the wrong polling place, it's a pretty big deal, especially if it's toward the end of the
day, and especially if it's an election that's closely contested like
2010."
Aristotle chose these states for its study: Arkansas, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington state. It also included the District of Columbia.
Aristotle is a competitor to Google with its own ballot box location service: whereivote.com. (I tried putting in my address, but no polling place came up. Also interesting: there were two ads for Google Places on the site.)
Romm summed up how Aristotle found the Google gaffe:
Aristotle premised its prediction on a series of simulations: The company selected about 1,000 households in targeted states, compared
their polling place data against Google's app and derived an error rate
it later used to predict the number of area households possibly affected
by the mishap.
Aritotle also contacted Fast Company, which had noticed the problem yesterday too.
E.B. Boyd broke it down about why this problem could have affected even more than the 700,000-plus Aristotle estimated were steered wrong.
Google's election gadget, which is embeddable and therefore is probably sitting on sites across the Internet (including Facebook), draws its
data from the Voting Information Project as well as directly from
individual election boards. It was not clear as of this writing where
the break might have 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 for free to third parties to use for
applications like Google's tool, or the Mobile Polling Place Locator we
told you about last week. In cases where agencies did not set up a
pipeline via the Voting Information Project, Google receive polling
place information directly from election agencies themselves.
Google knows it messed up bigtime. Spokesman Aaron Zamost told Politico the company is working diligently to fix the problem and "make
sure it reflects the most up-to-date information provided to us by the
board of elections."
Boyd followed up and received the silent treatment: "Reached again today, Google declined to elaborate on its statement following the Aristotle revelations."
UPDATE: Aristotle's Phillips released this statement today:
"As millions of Americans went to the polls on Tuesday, Google offered to provide voters with accurate information about their polling place. Unfortunately, according to investigations by various
reporters and observers, and an Aristotle review of the tool, the
technology used likely produced erroneous information for some voters.
(FastCompany, Politico, ResourceShelf) While we do not know the full
scope of the problem, any mistakes should be reason for concern for
Google and for all of us. The races decided by razor-thin margins or
still hanging in the balance illustrate this point. So does the
experience of anyone who was directed to the wrong polling place on
Election Day."
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