In case you’ve been living under a rock and didn’t know Australia is in the middle of a Federal Election cycle. Yep, the big gals and guys in Canberra are due to face the public. For some of you knowing where to vote and who to vote for may be a trivial thing. For others, you may be looking for a little help.
As of today, you can visit g.co/ausvotes to get access to a range of helpful tools to assist you this election cycle. The new site offers an interactive map including details of every electorate boundary, which candidates are running on your seat, where to find local polling booths and quick directions from home to the polls and back again.
But wait there’s more, through sites such as democracy sausage and Snagvotes you will also be able to determine which polling booth is hosting sausage sizzles or bake stands. Let’s face it if you have to go and vote in this election then a sausage may just make it bearable. You’ll find all the information from these two sites included in Google’s map. If you’re interested you’ll also be able to embed the map into your own site.
Come polling day the interactive map will transform into real-time updates on how the nation or individual seats are polling for the House of Representatives. Information will be updated as it comes in from the Australian electoral Commission including, % of votes counted and how each party is polling across all 150 seats. As the counting goes on the map will be automatically colour coded to reflect which party holds the majority of votes at last count.
For those who are used to keeping up with the election via various online trackers, Google’s offering could well provide a great window into the results as they roll out on election night, and perhaps even the following morning.
This is the second announcement that Google has made about improving their services around the next election, last month they also announced that any party with at least 10 members in the House of Representatives is able to post directly to search results.
Services such as this demonstrate the ways in which Google continue to work toward their Goal or sorting and organising the world’s information to make it accessible.
Will you be tuning into Google on election night to keep track? Let us know below.
“Next weekend” ?
Someone had better tell Turnbull, he’s pretty sure he ordered the 2nd July. He’ll hardly have the policies written by next weekend ….
It all comes down to your point of view, for me the next Saturday is the start of this weekend, the following week would be next weekend. Either way it’s the 2nd of July as you said.