Battle of the Voting Place Tools

In past election cycles, the Republicans and Democrats have developed their own custom applications to help citizens find out where they can go vote.  This year, Google did everyone a service by developing a gadget that lets everyone embed a gadget that lets site visitors find out where they can go vote.  I’ve embedded the gadget below.

The McCain campaign and RNC saw this as a great way to save time and money, and are using the gadget on their sites to help voters find out where to vote.

In a move we’ve come to expect from the well-funded Obama campaign, they chose to develop a robust, custom application instead of using Google’s free tool.  The Obama version is more feature rich than Google’s tool, including directions to your voting location, info on the laws in your state, links to external resources and the ability to to have the directions emailed to you.  You can see a screenshot of the Obama tool here.