Why every campaign site needs a "find your polling place" tool

The short version: a "where do I vote" page is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort pages a campaign site can carry — it turns a supporter's last-mile confusion into a completed ballot. Most of the free tools that do this run on Google's Civic Information API, which is still active despite Google quietly shutting down a related API last year. It's genuinely useful, with one real caveat for down-ballot races: coverage of the specific contest depends on whether your county participates in a national data-sharing project. We're specing this as a set of built-in blocks for Electbase — not live yet, but on the roadmap.

The moment campaigns lose supporters

A voter who read your issues page, likes what they see, and clicks "learn more" about voting doesn't need to be convinced anymore — they need friction removed. Where's my polling place? Is early voting open? Where's the nearest ballot drop box? If that answer isn't one click away on your own site, you've handed the moment to a Google search that might land them somewhere else, or nowhere.

This is true at every level, but it matters most for the down-ballot races Electbase serves. A school board or city council candidate doesn't have the name recognition to survive a supporter giving up at the "how do I actually vote" step.

What's already out there

Most campaigns today either link out to their Secretary of State's voter portal or Vote.org, or embed a widget that's quietly built on the same underlying data source almost everyone uses: Google's Civic Information API.

That API has had a rough couple of years. Google shut down its Representatives API — the "who's my representative and how do I reach them" lookup — in April 2025. But the part that actually matters for a "where do I vote" tool, the voterInfoQuery endpoint, is still live and actively documented as of this writing: polling locations, early-vote sites, ballot drop boxes, contest and ballot-measure text, and state election-official contact info, all keyed off a residential address.

The catch: coverage isn't universal

The data doesn't come from Google itself — it comes from the Voting Information Project, a partnership where state and local election officials submit standardized election data. That partnership covers state and federal general elections well. It's inconsistent for the hyper-local, off-cycle races that make up a lot of down-ballot campaigning: school board, special district, municipal-only elections.

Two things soften that in practice. First, polling place and early-vote and drop-box locations are tied to the voter's jurisdiction, not the specific race — so those usually resolve correctly even when a particular school board contest isn't itemized in the response. Second, the underlying "elections" list only surfaces contests that are currently active or coming up soon, typically populated a few weeks before Election Day rather than months in advance. A tool built on this data is naturally a countdown-to-Election-Day feature, not a year-round reference page — which is fine, since that's exactly when supporters are searching for this information anyway.

The right framing is "check your polling place," not "here's everything about your ballot" — the first is honest and still genuinely useful.

What it costs to build on

Nothing, at the scale a campaign tool needs. The API is free with a default quota of 25,000 queries per day per project, and Google's own guidance says quota increases are approved for exactly this kind of user-facing, address-in-answer-out use case. The real constraints aren't cost — they're a handful of usage rules from Google's developer guidelines: cached results can't be kept more than 24 hours for voting-location data (30 days for office-holder and district data), every visitor has to see the same result for the same address rather than any kind of A/B-tested variant, and attribution, if shown, has to use one of Google's approved phrases rather than custom copy.

What's coming to Electbase

We're specing this as three separate blocks in Electbase's page-builder library, not one bundled widget — the same kind of drop-in components as the existing volunteer-signup and events blocks, all reading from a single address lookup behind the scenes: Where to vote (polling place, early-vote sites, ballot drop boxes), What's on my ballot (candidate contests and ballot measures, when the data covers them), and Election admin & registration help (correction and absentee-request links, your local election office's phone number). A candidate can drop in all three or just the ones that fit their page — a ballot-measure PAC might only need the second one. Every block carries a clear note to confirm details with the county elections office, the same honesty standard we hold for the compliance side of the platform.

None of this is live yet. It's planned as part of the standard block library — the same tier that includes the events and volunteer tools — with no extra cost on top of your plan. The first two blocks are also the missing piece behind two of our template categories that already exist today, GOTV & Voter Education and Ballot Measure, which currently ship with the right structure but no functional voter-info tool behind them yet.