A Deeper Look at the Elections, or Not
Along with records for spending by candidates, every presidential election seems to set records for use of technology, and this one is no exception.
Digital tools are being used in myriad ways in 2012. The Obama campaign created a smartphone app to help volunteers canvass. Two clever apps will listen to political ads and give users information about the organizations that paid for them: Ad Hawk, by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that uses the Internet to promote government transparency, and Super PAC App by Glassy Media, an offshoot of the M.I.T. Media Lab.
For $1, Presidential Election Race 2012 will allow people to obsess over political polls and prediction markets. And this is to say nothing of the election news apps that The New York Times and other publications have created.
Just in time for Election Day comes Vote Planner, a Web app also from the Sunlight Foundation that is to go live on Monday. It is designed to help voters with decision-making up and down the ballot, not just in the presidential race.
Log on by entering your address into the site, and you are presented with a list of the choices on your ballot. (The site does not show what the ballot will actually look like, however.) The site also shows contributions the candidates have received, broken down by industry, and endorsements from dozens of local and national groups. (Sunlight primarily focused on gathering the opinions of local groups in New York and San Francisco for this election cycle.) The information extends from the presidential race to state legislative contests.
You can create a voting plan and publish it to a link that you can share with others or e-mail to yourself. By linking the app to a Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus account, you share whom you have selected for each race, and you get to see whom your friends are voting for. The idea is that voters who publicize their choices will encourage other people to vote, and there is some evidence that peer pressure on social media makes a difference: A study published last month by the journal Nature found that a special “get out the vote†message on Facebook had a demonstrable impact on voter turnout.
If you are not interested in sharing, do not link to a social media account. Your choices are public immediately, even if you have not clicked “publish.â€
According to the Sunlight Foundation, the tool was initially envisioned as a mobile guide that voters could bring into the booth with them. But deadlines caught up with the developers, and Vote Planner exists only as a Web site that works best on a standard Web browser or a tablet, rather than a mobile phone.
It also seems strange that Vote Planner does not tell people where to vote, even though that was part of Google's Civic Information A.P.I., or application programming interface, which Sunlight used to create its project.
Vote Planner is not the only project to use the A.P.I., however; it is open to any developer who wants to build an app with it. Google is also working with the Pew Center on the States and public officials on the Voting Information Project, which is creating a number of Web apps to help people monitor the voting process.
But maybe you are looking for less information about politics, not more. There is a technological solution for that as well. Unpolitic.me, an extension for Google's Chrome Web browser, will block all political updates from your Twitter and Facebook feeds and replace them with pictures of cats.
Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips via e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or via Twitter to @joshuabrustein.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 28, 2012, on page MB2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Deeper Look at the Elections, or Not.