Inspiration
Local elections decide issues that have huge impacts on our lives such as school funding, policing, and housing but they often have shockingly low voter turnout compared to national elections. For example, King County had an average turnout of 80% in 2024 but only 37% in 2023! Poll Pal is built to help close that gap by making it easy for people to find when their next local election is.
What Poll Pal does
Poll Pal helps users discover upcoming local elections just by entering their address. It uses the Google Civic Information API to deliver details about municipal, county, and state-level elections.
How we built Poll Pal
Poll Pal was built from the ground up to be as intuitive and simple as possible. The distraction-free UI is a central feature of the product. Using Express.js for our backend and plain css, javascript, and html for our frontend to build a lightweight, mobile-friendly website. Finally, we deployed it to AWS to deliver low-latency access to users around the world.
Challenges we ran into
Many election data APIs are locked behind paywalls, which led us to rely solely on the Google Civic API. While it's a great tool, it may not always have information about local elections until just a few weeks prior to them.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of the final product we've achieved. It is a simple, easy to use tool that helps citizens be more engaged in their communities by voting in often overlooked local elections.
What we learned
We all learned a lot in the process of creating Poll Pal. This ranges from the sociological (like why local election turnout is so low) to the technical (like how to create a usable product in 48 hours). This is an experience we will all remember and take lessons from into our future projects.
What's next for Poll Pal
We plan to integrate more sources than just Google Civic into our process and add features for automatic location detection, nearest polling places, and having the option to save found election dates to your calendar
Example locations to try
Links lead to a few locations in redfin where there are elections coming up. Choose any address!
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