Google Search to offer guidance on voter registration for US elections
16 Jul 2016
Google is preparing for the election season by providing voters with information for politics-related searches.
Starting Monday, when users searched ''register to vote'' or similar queries, Google would serve up state-by-state guides on how to register to vote, general requirements and deadlines on top of the search page.
Also, search queries for the Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention - where both parties would officially nominate their candidate for president would offer a summary of the convention, nominees and the lineup of speakers.
Users would also see a livestream of the conventions posted on YouTube and relevant social media posts within the Google search webpage or app.
The Republican National Convention would open in the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Monday, while the Democrat Convention would be held between 25 to 28 July in Philadelphia.
''We hope these new features in Search will help keep you informed this election season and make it easier for you to make it to the ballot box in November,'' Google product manager Jacob Schonberg said in a press release.
Twitter and Facebook were also involved in keeping users posted on convention activities. Twitter would livestream CBS News' online coverage of the convention. The micro-blogging network relased hashtags for convention-related tweets.
According to commentators who commended the initiative, knowing what it took to register to vote could be tricky. The same was also true of finding the specific process and deadline to register for particular states.
Google would also attempt to help users with that, saying that whenever someone searched "register to vote," or something similar, the search results they saw would not only share the general requirements to be eligible to register, but would also offer users a guide on how to register in their state.
That guidance would also include state-by-state deadlines, so there would be little excuse for not being registered at the time of the general election.
