At a July 9 reception at the National Association of Secretaries of State 2015 Summer Conference in Portland, Maine, Google presented awards to seven states—Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin—for their commitment to using new technologies to serve their voters. Specifically, these states are at the forefront of providing their constituents with accurate, official voting information by delivering standardized data on polling places and ballot contents to the Voting Information Project (VIP).
VIP, a project of Pew, in partnership with Google and states, aims to ensure that voters have the answers they need to basic questions such as, "Where is my polling place?" "What's on my ballot?" and "How do I navigate the voting process?" In 2014, VIP data were accessed through the Google Civic Information API approximately 31 million times in the run-up to the general election and on Election Day.
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